Michael Pearce - A Cold Touch of Ice

‘And now this! How can it be? How can they do this to us? He was their friend, everybody knew him. Everybody loved him. He used to go there every night, to that café, and play dominoes with Hamdan and Abd al Jawad and Fahmy Salim. Every night! For years and years. They were inseparable. People made a joke of it. They were the four comers of the house, people said. Take one away, and the coffee house would fall down. That’s what they said. And now – now they have taken one away.’

She poured it all out.

‘And it is all because of this stupid war. It must be! There can’t be any other reason. He never did anyone an injury.

‘This stupid war! But it’s not our fault. We were against it from the start, we were appalled, like they were. And they said: “No, no, Sidi,” – that is what they called him, Sidi – “you cannot be blamed. The politicians are mad. They always are. They are mad here, too. No, no, Sidi, you are one of us.”

‘And he thought he was one of them, too; I thought I was. This is our home, this is our country. Why should it turn on us? We have loved it, we have worked for it. We thought we were Egyptian too.

‘And now this. How can it be? How can they turn on him? What harm has he ever done them? What harm has he ever done anybody? Why should they turn on him, their friend, the man who has lived among them for years? How can people be like that?’

Mahmoud had come in and was standing by the door expressionlessly. He caught Owen’s eye and Owen followed him out.

‘I see,’ said Owen. ‘So that’s why you called me.’

‘No,’ said Mahmoud. ‘We don’t know yet that it was a political crime.’

‘Then –?’

He led him off through the house. It was tall and thin, rather like Mahmoud’s own, and, like that one, had an inner courtyard. They went across the courtyard and out through a door on the other side. It led them into a great, cavernous, hall-like building which seemed to serve as a warehouse. It contained a bewildering diversity of goods: divans, tables, rugs, great copper-and-silver trays, a lot of brassware – there was a whole corner of the elegant brass ewers called ibreek which the Arabs use for pouring water over the hands, along with the tisht , the quaint basins and water-strainers that went with them. There were, too, oddly, piles of clothes: finely embroidered shirts which might have belonged to sheiks, lovely old Persian shawls, hand-worked as close as if they were woven, filmy rainbow-coloured veils worn by dancing girls.

Mahmoud led him across to a huge stack of bales of raw cotton. The stuff of one of the bales had been torn, probably in transit, and through the tear there appeared the gleam of something black. Mahmoud pulled more of the cotton aside, put in his hand and tugged. Even before it came out, Owen knew what it was: the barrel of a gun.

Only four of the bales had guns concealed in them. When they had opened them all, they found a total of fifteen rifles and six revolvers; numbers which Owen found puzzling. Gun-running or gun-using? The numbers were too small for the former and large for the latter – there were assassination attempts all the time, but they seldom involved more than two or three people.

And then there was another puzzle: where they had been found. In the house of an Italian. Gun-running in Egypt at the moment was from the Sinai peninsula to Tripolitania, from the Turks to their allies fighting against the Italians. What sort of Italian was it who would be arming enemies against his own kind? He could think of plenty of people who might for one reason or another, for profit or for patriotism, be running guns; but the one national group that wouldn’t be, just at the moment, was the Italians.

But then, neither would they be smuggling guns in order to prepare for some armed raid or assassination attempt. It wasn’t from foreign nationals that such attempts came; it was from nationalistically-minded Egyptians.

One thing, however, was clear.

‘It looks,’ he said to Mahmoud, ‘as if I’ll be joining you in your investigations.’

Sidi Morelli had been an auctioneer. For some reason that Owen could not fathom, many of the auctioneers in Cairo and Alexandria were Italian. The counting at auctions was often done in Italian: uno, due … Strangely, that was not always so at the auctions conducted by Sidi Morelli himself, whose business included both an up-market end, based upon hired premises in the Europeanized Ismailiya Quarter, and a down-market end held in a tented enclosure close to the Market of the Afternoon, where proceedings were conducted totally in Arabic.

When Owen went there the following day he found a few people poking round the various lots stacked at one end of the enclosure while the sundry Levantines who normally assisted Sidi Morelli stood about uncertainly. An auction had been scheduled for that morning but then, since instructions had been lacking, had been abandoned.

‘No, I don’t know when it will be held.’ one of the Levantines was saying to a rather crumpled-looking Greek. ‘Yes, I know you’re looking for cotton, and, yes, we do have some in our warehouse, but the Parquet are crawling all over it and I don’t know when they’ll be finished.’

‘It’s raw cotton, is it?’ said the Greek.

‘Yes.’

‘And slightly damaged? That’s what the man told me last week.’

‘Yes, it’s slightly damaged. That’s why we’ve got it and why it’s not going to the cotton market.’

‘Do you think I could go to your warehouse and take a look at it?’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Not just at the moment. As I said, the Parquet are all over the place –’

‘The Parquet? What are they doing there?’

‘I told you. Our boss has just died and –’

‘Do you think there’s any chance of a reduction?’

‘For the cotton? Look –’

‘Yes. You know, to get rid of it. Not have it hanging about on your hands. While they’re working out the estate.’

‘Look, he’s only just died!’

‘Yes, but –’

‘No!’ said the Levantine in a fury. ‘No!’

The Greek moved away.

‘These bloody Greeks!’ the Levantine said to Owen. They’re so bloody sharp, they cut themselves!’

An Arab dressed in a dirty blue galabeah came in under the awning.

‘Louis,’ he said to the Levantine, ‘is there any chance of the angrib ?’

He pointed to a rope bed in one of the lots.

‘Sidi said I could have it if you didn’t sell it this time, and I’ve got a customer waiting.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said the Levantine. ‘If it’s not gone twice there’s no reason to suppose it would go the third time.’

‘Thanks.’

The Arab called a porter, who picked up the bed and walked out with it across his shoulders.

The Arab hesitated.

‘If I sell it, you know –’

‘That’s all right,’ said Louis.

‘I wouldn’t like the Signora –’

‘That’s all right.’

‘We let the stallholders have the stuff we can’t sell,’ the Levantine said to Owen.

The Greek returned.

‘I’m looking for a baby-chair, too.’ he said.

‘Baby-chair!’

‘You know, one of those high chairs that kids can sit in.’

‘We don’t have any baby-chairs.’

‘It’s for when they get big enough to sit up at table.’

‘Yes, I know what a baby-chair is. But we don’t have any. Not here. We wouldn’t have any. People around here sit on the floor. Babies too.’

‘Oh!’

The Greek seemed cast down.

‘Maybe our other place –’ said the Levantine, relenting.

‘Other place?’

‘We’ve got a place up in the Ismailiya. That’s where we put the better-quality stuff. It’s brassware, antiques, mostly, but occasionally we get some European furniture. You could try there.’