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

Georgiades went past again. This time he didn’t say anything. His brow was furrowed in concentration. The sweat ran down his face in streams.

His men were beginning to return from their searches. They came and stood in a little group, disciplined and obedient. Owen didn’t need to ask. They had found nothing.

Georgiades, vexed, went off on a search of his own. His second-in-command re-divided the men and sent them back for a second search of the places they had searched before. Owen had hoped to avoid this. It all took time.

He went to the door of the church and looked out. Already a little crowd had gathered. He saw Mahmoud, who caught his eye questioningly. Owen shook his head.

Back in the church the priests were shouting angrily at the men. The men, who were mostly Sudanis from the south, ignored them but looked uneasy.

Georgiades came back mopping his face. He stood in the centre of the church beneath the great dome and began to look carefully all round him.

The men, returned from the second time, stood waiting.

“Have you done the crypt?”

Georgiades nodded without speaking. His eyes were now on the roof.

The Father broke away from the knot of priests, shrugging off the efforts of the men to restrain him, and came across to Owen.

“I am not having this,” he said.

Owen ignored him. He thought he could hear a growing murmur outside.

“You have no right!” the Father said hotly.

“The Mamur Zapt has the right,” said Owen.

Strictly speaking, he was correct. The Mamur Zapt had right of entry to all premises in Cairo. However, it was a right which it was sometimes wise not to use.

“This is sacrilege!”

“My men have been very careful.”

He turned away. The Father hesitated, looked for a moment as if he was going to come after him, then shrugged and rejoined the knot.

The door of the church opened. The murmur of the crowd became more distinct. Mahmoud came in.

“Soon,” said Owen.

He would not be able to hold them for long.

Mahmoud went out. The door closed firmly behind him. He would hold the crowd as long as he could. Owen had no doubts on that score. But he was a Moslem and the crowd would be Copt. Owen himself would have to go out soon.

Georgiades made a sudden dart. There were no towers to the church, no staircases going upwards. But there would be access to the roof, if only for care and maintenance.

Georgiades had found out. It was a series of pegs in the wall going upwards. He began to climb. Two of his men followed him.

Georgiades was a bulky man, not good at this sort of thing. It would have been better to have let the men go first. He could see Georgiades stop to catch his breath. No doubt he was thinking the same thing. He went grimly on.

The pegs went up to the level of the bottom of the big dome. Now Owen looked, he could see a thin gallery running round it. It could be no more than a foot wide. In the darkness it was hard to see but it looked as if there wasn’t even a railing.

“Light the lamps!” Owen said.

The men ran round the church seizing any lamp they could find. Some of them brought candles and torches. There were indignant shouts from the priests.

As the lamps were raised, the shadows chased back towards the top of the dome. In the less than half light Owen saw that Georgiades had come out onto the gallery.

There was a sudden shout. Below Georgiades his men leapt up the last few pegs. Georgiades began to go one way round the gallery, his men the other. Their shadows loomed grotesquely on the sides of the dome.

And with them another shadow, smaller, hunched, desperate.

The shadows converged.

And then, before they quite met, the smaller shadow seemed to detach itself from the wall and move out into space. It hung there for a moment. Then it fell.

"Dead! In his own church!” said the Moslems with satisfaction. There was general agreement-among the Moslems-that justice had been done. It was accepted without question, even by the Copts, that Zoser had been the Zikr’s killer and the Moslems were pleased that the matter had ended in such a satisfactory and clean-cut way. The British, it was agreed by all, on this occasion, were men of justice despite their many other faults, only they did have a habit of making tidy things untidy by over-insistence on bureaucratic process. Better that it should end like this, when justice was not only done but manifestly seen by all to be done.

Surprisingly, however, some Moslems, mostly at the upper end of the social scale, disagreed.

“It’s this tax business,” Paul explained, “this levy the Khedive is proposing. Word of it is beginning to get round and the Copts are already showing signs of growing restive. The Khedive is starting to realize that he might have trouble on his hands. So he doesn’t want incidents like this.”

“It’s a mess,” was the way Garvin put it later. “Administratively, I mean. It would have been better to have taken him prisoner. We could have delayed the trial until the tax business was settled. Then it wouldn’t have mattered.”

“Jane Postlethwaite wouldn’t have been here to give evidence.”

“You weren’t planning to use her, surely?” said Garvin, rubbing his chin.

That was one good thing to come out of the affair. Jane Postlethwaite wouldn’t have to give evidence. When the news was broken to her she suddenly went white. “Poor man,” she said. “Poor, poor man.” Zeinab took a more practical view. “It was a good job you didn’t have to climb up that ladder,” she said. “What ladder?” asked Owen. Zeinab was always imprecise about detail.

The reaction of the Copts was strangely muted. The Metropolitan, of course, complained-that was what Garvin was seeing Owen about. Various local delegations came to Owen to protest about the invasion of the church. Zoser was scarcely mentioned.

Andrus was a member of one of the delegations. On this occasion he said unusually little.

So far there was no word from the Patriarch, or from Abyssinia. Owen began to hope that they viewed the incident as too small to bother about. Perhaps it had not even been reported to them.

Mahmoud, busy as ever, had immediately switched to another case. It was clear that he regarded the matter as closed.

Owen was not so sure. Tit-for-tat- exchanges between the communities of Cairo did not necessarily end just because a man had been killed. He was waiting to see if there were any further attacks.

As the days went by, however, and no further incident was reported, he began to relax. His words to Osman appeared to have had some effect. On the Copt side, too, all was quiet. One morning he went so far as to say to Nikos that he thought the affair was now over.

“Yes,” said Nikos, “provided that it was the simple case.”

“What do you mean?”

“The simple case,” said Nikos, “is that the matter began and ended with the Zikr. He desecrated the tomb; he has paid for it.”

“Well?”

“The other case is when it doesn’t end there. Suppose Andrus were right? Suppose it were not the whole thing but part of a pattern? That gets more complex.”

“Polo,” said Paul.

“What?”

“Polo. It’s a game you play on horses. There’s a match tomorrow. Would you like to go and see it?”

“No!” said Owen.

“Pity. I’ve arranged for you to take Miss P.”

“I don’t want to watch polo. I’ve got better things to do.”

“Hasn’t everybody? However, that’s not the point. I need her out of the way tomorrow afternoon because things are reaching a juicy stage and I’ve got to work on her uncle.”

“Couldn’t you find somebody else?”

“I’ve picked you. Though not with the confidence I used to. However, with polo you ought to be all right. Just confine yourself to watching the game, that’s all. If a horse has to be shot, or, I suppose, a rider-perhaps they do that sort of thing in polo; I expect they do since the Army has a hand in it-you don’t have to go out of your way to ensure that she has a ringside seat. Nothing nasty this time, please.”