Michael Pearce - A Cold Touch of Ice

‘Thanks,’ said the Greek gratefully. He hesitated. ‘You don’t think they’d have any cotton?’

‘No!’ The Levantine almost shouted. ‘It’s only the better-quality goods. Everything else comes here. Cotton comes here. ’

‘Yes, I see. And when –?’

‘Look,’ began the Levantine again, desperately.

Owen went out into the huge square beneath the Citadel in which the Market of the Afternoon was held. All round the edges of the square camels were lying and among the camels were great cakes compounded equally of dates and dirt. The Market itself was up on a raised platform. You climbed the steps and found yourself in a kind of giant village market, where the stalls were often mere pitches, with the owner sitting on the ground and all his goods spread round him in the dust. Potential customers would crouch down and finger the goods; and the dust came in handy for writing out the bills.

The goods in the Market of the Afternoon were different from those in the bazaars. They were for the most part copper or brass and almost entirely second-hand, the copper pots often worn with the use of generations. Everything here was for use, although the use was sometimes a little strange: the manacles for the punishment of harem women, for instance. Yet among the worn and battered goods you could occasionally find things of value, brass bowls inscribed with Persian hunting scenes, finely wrought candlesticks for standing on the ground, intricately chased scriveners’ pots, one of which had been acquired here once by none other than the Mamur Zapt.

In the centre of the Market was a restaurant area, the restaurants consisting often merely of large trays on the ground, with meat and pickles in the middle. Customers sat round on the ground and dipped their hands in.

It was at one of these that Owen found the Arab who had collected the angrib from the auction room.

‘Sold it yet, then?’

The Arab pointed out beyond the stalls to where a man was loading a donkey. The donkey already had panniers hanging down on either side but now the man put the bed across its back; and then he climbed up on top himself.

‘I’ll let the signora have the five per cent,’ the Arab said to Owen.

‘The Signora? You reckon she’ll be taking it on?’ asked the man crouched next to him.

‘Her or someone else.’

‘They won’t be like Sidi Morelli,’ said his neighbour definitely.

‘No. He was one of us.’

It was a phrase that recurred whenever people spoke of Sidi Morelli. Owen heard it again that evening when he returned with Mahmoud to the coffee house at the end of Mahmoud’s street, the one to which Sidi Morelli had been carried when he died, and where he had been in the habit of going every evening, punctually at six, to play dominoes with his friends.

They were sitting there now at their usual table, the table that Owen had seen them at that evening. The dominoes had been spread out on the table but they weren’t really playing.

Mahmoud made straight towards them. They seemed to know him and stood up to shake hands. Mahmoud introduced Owen, first as a friend, and then, scrupulously, feeling that they should know, as the Mamur Zapt. They looked at him curiously but acceptingly. To be someone’s friend was sufficient to invoke the traditional Arab code of hospitality.

Sidi Morelli had been a friend, a long-standing one. The four of them had first started meeting, they explained, ten years before.

‘Hamdan and I were sitting here –’

‘With the dominoes.’

‘– when he came across and asked if he could join us.’

‘The dominoes were all in use, you see.’

‘Well, of course we said yes.’

‘But that was only three. However, just at that moment Fahmy came in –’

‘Whom he seemed to know –’

‘He used to come to me for ice,’ Fahmy explained.

‘And so then there were four of us and there have been four ever since.’

There was a little, awkward silence.

The patron came across, carrying two water-pipes. Behind him his small son struggled with a third. They put the bowls down on the floor beside the three men. The patron looked enquiringly at Mahmoud and Owen. They shook their heads.

‘He never smoked either,’ said Abd al Jawad sombrely.

The patron touched him commiseratingly on the shoulder, then went off for the coffee pot.

‘How can it be?’ said Fahmy suddenly, plainly still distressed. ‘Doesn’t God look down?’

‘He looks down,’ Hamdan chided him, ‘but he does not always interfere.’

‘He sees further than we do,’ said the third man.

Hamdan and Abd al Jawad were, it transpired, shopkeepers. Fahmy kept an ice house just round the comer. They all lived and worked within three hundred yards of the coffee shop.

‘Have you been to the Signora?’ Hamdan asked Abd al Jawad.

‘Yes. I said that we would wish to do what we could. Of course, it will be in the Italian church.’

Fahmy picked up one of the dominoes. He put it down again, however, aimlessly.

‘It’s not the same,’ he said.

‘No.’

‘You know no reason?’ asked Mahmoud.

They shook their heads.

‘He had no enemies,’ said Abd al Jawad.

‘People always say that, but –’

‘He had no enemies,’ Abd al Jawad insisted stubbornly.

Mahmoud let it rest.

‘He was no different that night?’

‘No different.’

Tell me how it was.’

‘Well, he came, and sat down as usual, and we played –’

‘What did you talk of?’

‘Fahmy’s nephew, and would he marry.’

‘It happens, you know, Mahmoud,’ said Abd al Jawad, with an attempt at humour.

‘He has just returned to Cairo,’ Fahmy explained.

‘Where had he been?’

‘In the Sudan. He is a soldier.’

‘Fahmy was worried that he might many someone unsuitable while he was there.’

‘We told him that he was much more likely to marry someone unsuitable back here in Cairo.’

‘And that the only thing to do was to get him properly married beforehand.’

‘Yes,’ said Hamdan. ‘In case he was sent away.’

‘Fahmy’s worried that he might be posted.’

‘Well,’ said Fahmy defensively, ‘it could happen, couldn’t it? Especially these days.’

‘Egypt’s not going to get involved in the war. The British will see to that’

‘I wouldn’t want him to go to the war,’ said Fahmy.

‘Then you can look on the British as a blessing,’ said Hamdan wryly, but with a quick look at Owen.

Owen laughed.

‘That is not how we are usually seen,’ he acknowledged.

The slight note of tension that had crept in seemed to ease.

Mahmoud brought it back again.

‘Sidi Morelli was Italian,’ he observed, as if casually.

‘He was one of us,’ said Abd al Jawad quickly, almost reprovingly.

Afterwards, Mahmoud took him to the spot where Sidi Morelli had been found lying. It was no more than twenty yards from the coffee house, but around the corner and along the Nahhasin. The Nahhasin was quiet at that point and almost deserted. There was a group of shops further along but here there were only houses, and they were the old, traditional ones which presented a blank wall at ground level containing only a door. The windows were higher up, at the level of the first storey, and tonight, at any rate, they were without lights. The street was dark and Owen could quite see how someone might have stumbled over Sidi Morelli.

He suddenly realized that that was the point of them being here. Mahmoud had wanted to see it as it had been the evening before, at the time when Sidi Morelli had been killed. It wasn’t exactly a reconstruction, although Mahmoud, trained, like the Parquet as a whole, in French methods of investigation, favoured reconstructions. It did, though, enable him to see it as it had been, and to check on one or two things: the witness’s story, for example, of how he had come to find the body.