Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Donkey-Vous

‘Gracious, Captain Owen!’ said Lucy Colthorpe Hartley. ‘I did not know you were such a connoisseur.’

‘Friends of yours?’ he asked, recovering quickly.

‘Intimate,’ she replied, sinking into a chair. ‘Abdul here greets me with a different nosegay every day.’

A beaming vendor, rather darker than the others, laid a bunch of sweetly-smelling flowers on the terrace beside her.

‘They don’t last long,’ she said, ‘but for a while they brighten up the room.’

She fumbled in her purse for some token piastres.

‘Allow me,’ said Owen.

Lucy put a restraining hand on his arm.

‘Certainly not!’ she said. ‘You are interfering with long-established custom. What you can do, though,’ she added, peering into her purse, ‘is help me count up the necessary milliemes as I seem to have run out of piastres.’

‘That’s enough. A little money goes a long way here.’

‘You’d better have a talk with my father. He doesn’t seem to think so.’

‘I’m sure he won’t mind the flowers.’

‘No. But he did mind the turquoises. I took them in to Andalaft’s as you suggested, Captain Owen, and he is going to find someone to make them up for me.’

‘Do you have other regulars among the vendors, Miss Colthorpe Hartley?’

‘I have a faithful following,’ said Lucy, ‘which I attribute more to misplaced hope than to my personal charms.’

‘They follow you wherever you sit?’

‘We usually sit in the same place.’

‘Which is at this end of the terrace, of course.’

‘It is exactly there,’ said Lucy, pointing. ‘How disillusioning! There I was hoping that what had brought you here was the attraction of my big blue eyes when all the time you are merely getting on with your work.’

‘I am combining work with pleasure. A little work and a lot of pleasure.’

‘At least you have the proportions right,’ said Lucy. ‘You were, if you remember, going to tell me exactly what was your work, Mamur Zapt.’

‘Well …’ said Owen.

‘How fascinating!’ said Lucy Colthorpe Hartley, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands and gazing straight into his eyes.

‘It didn’t look like work to me,’ said Zeinab.

Zeinab, unfortunately, had passed by in an arabeah on her way home from her hairdresser’s.

‘I was asking her about the street-vendors.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Zeinab sceptically.

‘Yes I was. I wanted to know if they were always the same. You see, if they were, they might have been there when Moulin was kidnapped and seen something.’

‘You were trying to see something,’ said Zeinab. ‘You were looking down the front of her dress.’

‘For heaven’s sake! She was across the table. How could I?’

‘She was leaning forward. Deliberately.’

‘Anyway she didn’t have on that sort of dress.’

‘You see! You did try!’

‘For God’s sake!’ said Owen, aware that he had lost yet another argument with Zeinab.

‘Well,’ demanded Nikos, ‘are you going to do something about it or not?’

‘I’m not going to stop it, if that’s what you mean.’

‘That’s not what I mean. The question is: do you want it watched? We don’t have to interfere at all. We could let it all go ahead as they’ve arranged, let the money change hands, wait till Moulin is freed—and only take action afterwards. That way we would get both Moulin and Zawia.’

‘Nice in theory, not so easy in practice. You’d have to be able to watch them all the way. Is that possible?’

‘It’s not easy,’ Nikos admitted.

Owen saw why when they made a reconnaissance that evening. The gambling salon was in a block of flats on the Sharia Imad-el-Din. It was on the first floor and was disguised as a scent factory. Nikos had been informing himself of its defences.

‘You get to it through the main entrance,’ he said. ‘There’s a door on to the stairs which is kept locked and has to be opened by the porter. At the top of the stairs there’s another door with a spyhole.’

‘Pretty standard.’

‘Yes. There’s an electric bell downstairs by the porter’s hand to give warning. Oh, and there’s a consular representative across the street.’

‘Which nationality is Anton claiming this week?’

‘Lebanese, I think.’

Since under the system of legal concessions to foreign governments known as the Capitulations the Egyptian police did not have right of entry to premises owned by foreigners, most gambling houses had taken the precaution of acquiring foreign ‘ownership’. To guard against misunderstandings—and misunderstandings were quite frequent as the police had often met the proprietor the week before when he was of a different nationality—the wealthier salons had taken to keeping a consular official handy on a permanent retainer for use in the event of an unexpected raid.

‘We’re not thinking of a raid, though,’ said Owen, ‘so it doesn’t matter.’

‘We’ll have to have someone inside.’

Owen looked doubtful. ‘What good would that do? They’d have to be customers. They couldn’t hang around the cloakroom. They’d have to go inside and play. They wouldn’t be able to see anything. What’s the internal geography of the place?’

‘You go through the door into a sort of vestibule. The cloakroom—it’s very small, barely room for the two attendants—is on one side. The tripot is on the other. You get to it through an arch.’

‘So you might be able to see something.’

‘You might. You’d be able to tell if someone left the tripot and went to the cloakroom. But my guess is that’s not how it will happen, anyway. I’ve been checking on the attendants in the cloakroom. There are two of them. One of them goes off duty at about one-thirty and another man comes in. I reckon that the one who goes off duty will be carrying the money with him. The timing fits. Berthelot gets there at about midnight and stays till two. By then there will have been time to count the money and the attendant will have been gone half an hour—long enough for him to be able to pass over the money.’

‘How does he leave the building?’

‘Through a side-door. I’ll have him tailed.’

‘He might not go that way this time.’

‘I think he will. They’ll want to keep it as normal as possible. In any case, though, I’ll put people all round the building. And on the roof.’

‘It’s a block of flats. There’ll be people coming and going all the time.’

‘At one o’clock in the morning? Carrying something? You’d have to have a bag or a case to carry that amount of money.’

‘I wish we could watch the cloakroom all the time.’

‘Can’t be done.’

‘What’s on the next floor up? Directly above the cloakroom?’

‘A sewing shop. Try moving all those girls.’

‘Why don’t we bribe one of Anton’s people and ask them to keep an eye on the cloakroom?’

‘They’ve got their jobs to do. They wouldn’t be able to watch all the time.’

‘All the same …’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said Nikos, ‘I already have.’

Owen had men watching Monsieur Berthelot. The following afternoon they reported that Berthelot had been to the bank twice. The second time he had come away carrying a small leather case. On both occasions he had been accompanied by a member of the staff of the French Consulate.

On a hunch Owen checked steamer bookings. Two passages had been reserved under the name of Berthelot on a boat leaving Alexandria in thirty-six hours’ time.

Mahmoud had heard nothing of any deal. Unlike Owen, he was dead against it.

‘Do it once and you’ll soon be doing it all the time,’ he said.