Michael Pearce - The Mamur Zapt and the Girl in Nile

‘He must know more than that,’ protested Owen. ‘Where the guns were hidden, for a start.’

‘He says he was told not to use the room.’

‘Who told him?’

‘A man.’

‘What sort of man?’

‘The usual. Galabeeyah and head-dress. The head-dress held across his face.’

‘No description?’

‘No description.’

‘Keep him,’ said Owen. ‘It may help him to see better. And send Georgiades down. See if he can find out anything.’

But this was bolting the door after the horse had gone. The teacher was unimportant and probably genuinely knew nothing. Georgiades questioned several other people: the kuttub’s watchman, a fiki who taught there, people in the neighbouring shops, but to no avail. The fact was that the guns had been there and Owen had missed them twice. The first time because he had allowed himself to be called away in the middle of things and hadn’t been able to supervise the men properly. The second time because—well, because they had been smart enough to smuggle the guns away right under the noses of the men he had posted to make sure that didn’t happen.

He was back where he had started. Only this time without the guns.

And still there were distractions! Mahmoud had traced the girls who had been on the Prince’s dahabeeyah and wanted Owen’s help in interviewing them. Owen could guess why that was. They must be foreign.

Because of treaty concessions imposed on Egypt over the centuries, the nationals of certain foreign powers had legal privileges. Their houses could not be entered by the police, for instance; they had to be tried by courts of their own country, not by Egyptian courts, and so on.

The definition of nationality, already elastic in this cosmopolitan country, was easily stretched and all kinds of dubious people claimed benefit of the Capitulations, as the privileges were called.

It was common practice, for example, for a brothel-keeper brought before a court to claim that he or she belonged to a privileged nationality. It was possible, if the police applied to the Consul of a country, to get the exemptions waived. But by the time the police had secured the exemption and got back to the brothel, the keeper would have changed his nationality and they would have to start all over again.

It was another of those things, like religion and women, that required policing to be resourceful in Cairo.

If you were dealing with a foreign national it often paid to have a representative of a Great Power, like Britain, at your back. But it was probably for another reason that Mahmoud had called on him. In a sensitive case like this, where action against foreign nationals might have diplomatic repercussions, it was wise to get the British on your side first.

Owen knew this and didn’t mind it. There were even advantages in that he might be able to ‘manage’ the affair better from the inside. All the same, just now it was a distraction.

However, he went. The two girls, it transpired, did not work in a cabaret but assisted at a gambling salon. Owen thought he knew what kind of assistance that was but Mahmoud said it was not like that, or not like that entirely.

‘It’s a very high-class salon,’ he said, ‘and the people who go there are more interested in gambling. They tend to be European, though, or Europeanized Egyptians and expect the social style of a club on the Riviera. There’s a reception area where they can sit and talk and the girls sit in there too and help the conversation along.’

At the request of the salon’s owner they met the girls not at the salon but in a hotel nearby. The salon was in the Ismailia quarter where all the best hotels were. They met in the Hotel Continental.

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