Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog

“Yes. You’ll be busy, won’t you?”

“I’ll need more money.”

Garvin shook his head.

“No chance. There’s a veto across the board on any increase. Until the main thing gets settled.”

“What do I do, then?”

“You’ll have to use the resources you’ve got,” said Garvin, and smiled ambiguously.

“Well,” said Georgiades, “I’ve found out what you wanted.”

He came into the room and poured himself a glass of water from the earthenware jug which stood, as it did in all the offices of Cairo, in the window so that the air currents could cool it. Although it was very hot, Owen had not put the fan on. It was a huge, three-bladed affair suspended from the roof and when it was at full blast it was hard to keep papers still on his desk. “It was the Zikr?”

“The man who put the dog in Andrus’s tomb and the man who got stabbed are one and the same Zikr.”

“You’re sure?”

“Ali is sure.”

“I’m not going to ask you how he made sure.”

“It cost a lot of money.”

Owen winced.

“He had to do deals. Each of these gangs have got their own territory. Ali’s territory is the Coptic graveyard so he had to make arrangements with the gangs in the Moslem graveyard. It’s a big one and there are three gangs involved.”

“The more people in it, the more it’s likely to get out.”

“If anything get out,” said Georgiades, “it won’t be linked with us.”

“I hope so. I certainly hope so.”

Georgiades put the glass down and mopped his brow. He was a bulky man and had been walking the streets and the sweat was running off him.

“What are you going to do now?”

“It gives us a motive, doesn’t it?”

“Does it?”

“That’s why Zoser killed him.”

“Why should Zoser care? It’s not his tomb.”

“Zoser doesn’t think like that. For him it’s a religious matter. It was an affront to his God.”

“Which he decided to avenge?”

“Yes.”

“All by himself?”

“Why not?”

“He’s only a little man,” said Georgiades, eyeing the glass again. He made up his mind and poured out some more water.

“Are you saying you think someone put him up to it?” Owen demanded.

“What do you think?”

“I think,” said Owen, “that at least we’ve got bloody Zoser. That’ll satisfy the Moslems. And the Copts are hardly in a position to complain. We could look for the people who put him up to it. In fact, we might well do that. Quietly. No hurry. But we don’t have to.”

“You’d prefer to see it ended?”

“Yes.”

“OK.” Georgiades finished the glass and put it down.

“As long as everybody else sees it the same way,” he said.

“I can’t use this?” said Mahmoud.

“You can use it,” said Owen, “but not in court. My informant is not in a position to testify.”

“A pity. There’s no chance you could persuade him?”

“No chance at all.”

“What about the first identification? The Zikr who planted the dog?”

“That too.”

“Pity. You see, if I had the original identification I could at least match it up against a description.”

“Afraid not.”

“The same informant?”

“The same informant.”

“You’re relying on him a lot.”

“I think he’s pretty reliable.”

“But he won’t talk? In public, I mean?”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” said Mahmoud, “it’s something, at any rate. Now that I know what I’m looking for I’ll see if I can dig it out by other means.”

“Are you going to pull him in?”

“Not till I’ve done some more checking. I’d like to have a bit more before I go for him.”

“Don’t leave it too long. Otherwise he mightn’t be there when you go to pick him up.”

And that was the trouble. For when, two days later, Mahmoud’s men went to call on Zoser, they found that the bird had flown.

Didn’t you ever have a man on him?” said Owen incredulously.

Mahmoud flushed.

“I don’t have as many men as you,” he replied angrily.

“Even so!”

Owen was furious. He had counted on wrapping this up. With Zoser inside, at least he would have headed off trouble from the Moslems. Now he couldn’t count on that. And suppose they found out that a man had slipped through their fingers? It would be even worse. Mahmoud had bungled it. Not to pick Zoser up was fair enough, he had advocated that himself. But not to put a man on him. That was bloody stupid.

In fact, Mahmoud had put a man on Zoser but he preferred not to admit it. The man had gone to sleep, or at least that was what Mahmoud suspected, and that, to Mahmoud, was an even harder thing to admit than that he had not posted a man in the first place. Not being able to post a man was a matter of economics. Having one go to sleep on the job, well, that was just incompetence; and Mahmoud was very sensitive to the charge of Egyptian incompetence. Especially as, privately, he thought the charge was often justified.

It was in a case like this, too, that the weakness of the Egyptian system became apparent. The Parquet, the Department of Prosecution of the Ministry of Justice, which Mahmoud belonged to, and the Police were two entirely different and separate organizations. Mahmoud was responsible for collecting the evidence, deciding whether there was a case, and then carrying through prosecution. In doing so he had to rely on the police for manpower. Working to his instructions, they would collect evidence, do low-level questioning, keep people under surveillance, and if necessary arrest. The trouble was that since they were not directly under his control he was unable to ensure the quality of their work in the way that, for example, Owen could. What made matters worse was that the police were so badly paid that they could be recruited only from poor, country districts and lacked the sophistication, education and even, Mahmoud suspected at times, mother-wit of city people. Owen, because he could pay more, was able to draw his own men almost exclusively from the city. That was another thing that Mahmoud felt was wrong.

Owen’s reaction touched him on a sore spot; and it was made all the sorer by an angry feeling inside him that there had indeed been incompetence, Egyptian incompetence, that he, Mahmoud, was ultimately responsible for it-and that there was absolutely nothing that he could in practice do about it.

“There must have been a leak,” he said sullenly.

Owen was taken aback. This was something that had not occurred to him.

“A tip-off?”

“Yes. How else would he have known?”

“The church? The visit to the Scentmakers’ Bazaar? Your men’s inquiries?”

This upset Mahmoud still further. His men again.

“Their inquiries were general,” he said harshly. “They are always making such inquiries. There was nothing to link them directly to Zoser.”

“Surely they asked questions about Zoser?”

“And others.”

“That might have been enough. Or maybe, seeing us the second time, he might have suspected. Especially if he spotted that it was the third time, for Miss Postlethwaite and me.”

Mahmoud was silent.

“How much notice did you give your men?”

Mahmoud was now in one of those moods in which he found implied criticism hard to take. Owen half-realized this and if he had had any sense would have shut up, but Mahmoud’s moods blew up very suddenly out of an apparently clear sky and once again he was slow in reacting.

“They had no notice.”

Mahmoud did not say that this was because he did not trust them. “I made up my mind, collected them and went straight down.”

“Anyone else in your office know?”