The Girl in the Nile (6 page)

“Perhaps this one will too. When it gets there.”

Owen didn’t quite understand this and would have asked more but the two men ducked into the next house. He continued slowly along the street, noting how long it took them. Everything was going to be under control this time.

There was nothing wrong with the efforts of his men at the moment. They were working through the buildings quickly and, as far as he could tell, efficiently.

They turned up the next street. It contained some taller buildings with shops on the ground floor. This would take them longer. After waiting a little, Owen sauntered on.

Halfway up the street was a tall sebil, or fountain house. It was, like the hammam, an old building, clearly predating the other buildings since the street curved back specially to accommodate it.

It was a delightful building. Its totally curved sides were fenced with grilles of exquisite metalwork and its upper story was graciously arcaded. There was a little parapet going round the arcade and it suddenly occurred to Owen that it might provide a vantage point from which he could more pleasantly monitor proceedings.

He climbed up the outside staircase past the fountains surrounded by black-veiled women filling their pots with water and out onto the little parapeted promenade which crowned the second story.

From inside the arcade came the murmur of children’s voices. As with many of the larger sebils, the arcaded upper story was occupied by a kuttub, a school where little children received their first lessons on the Koran.

Owen smiled. It was an unexpectedly tender insight on the part of the Arabs to accommodate their infants up here where it was airy and cool.

He walked to the parapet and looked over. Down in the street he could see some of his men. They approached a house and went in. Not long afterwards, watching, he saw them appear on the roof. They looked around for a moment and then went down.

From where he stood, high up, he could look down on the roofs of the houses. Most of them were flat and empty, save for the occasional bundle of firewood, the heap of vegetables, the pile of cornstalks. One or two of the larger houses, though, had roof gardens; and, as he watched, two women came up on to one of these and began watering the plants.

It was a house about two along from the one he had been looking at previously. He hoped the women would have completed their task and departed before his men arrived. Servants would probably warn them but if there was an outside staircase and his men dashed up—?

He watched anxiously. The men went into the next house and worked through it. The women went on watering.

The men finished the house and came out into the street. And at that moment, fortunately, the women left the roof of their own accord.

Owen breathed a sigh of relief. It wouldn’t have done for the women to be met by his men. That, yet again, could have caused trouble.

What a country this was to police in! Mosques, bathhouses, roofs—you could offend someone’s susceptibilities by searching any of them. What were you to do? If it wasn’t religion, it was women!

His men, searching both sides of the street, had covered that block of houses and were now coming up the street towards the fountain house. He went down to meet them.

“That one next?” said one of the men, indicating the fountain house with his hand.

“Of course!”

The women watched them curiously as they mounted the stairs. Owen was about to move away when one of his men appeared above the parapet and waved to him urgently.

He ran up.

In an inner room, beyond the chanting class, were some sacks and packaging. The men had picked up the sacks and shaken them out. And out had fallen two new live clips of ammunition.

“Of course, we’re holding the teacher,” said Owen.

“That won’t do much good,” said Garvin scornfully. “They moved the guns this morning right in front of him.”

“This morning?”

Owen swallowed.

“Yes, this morning. When we started searching.”

“I thought you had people on the lookout?”

“Well, we did. But—”

“You seem to be mislaying a lot of things lately,” said Garvin. “First, the body. Now the guns.”

“He says that all he knows is that the men came this morning and took away the guns,” said Nikos, Owen’s Official Clerk and Office Manager.

“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. Galabeah and headdress. The headdress 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 neighboring 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.

When they arrived they were taken at once to a private alcove. Owen was amused to see that hospitality had been provided. That wouldn’t get far with Mahmoud, who, strict Muslim that he was, drank only coffee.

The women must already have been there, for the maître d’hôtel brought them immediately. They were dressed in discreet though well-cut black and, in deference to the customs of the country, long veils, which they put aside as soon as they sat down. One was Belgian, the other Hungarian. Their names were Nanette and Masha.

“We’ve got other names, too,” they pointed out. Mahmoud addressed them as Mademoiselle.

Yes, they had been on the dahabeeyah. They had been approached beforehand and had agreed to go to Luxor and back as members of the Prince’s party.

“A Prince, after all,” said Nanette, with a roll of her eyes.

Masha was less impressed. Apparently, princes were two a penny in Hungary.

“What did that entail?” asked Owen.

“What do you mean?”

“How friendly did you have to be?”

Nanette shrugged her shoulders.

“So-so,” she said.

They had met Narouz previously.

“He came to the salon. Not regularly. He would come several times in a week and then you wouldn’t see him for ages.”

He liked talking to them, they said. Just talking. They wouldn’t have minded other things too but talking was what he wanted.

“He could get as much of the other as he liked,” said Masha. “The one thing he couldn’t get in Egypt, he said, was intelligent female conversation. It’s the lives they lead,” she explained. “Shut up in those harems!”

“You’re not saying he came to the salon just for conversation?”

“No, no. He liked gambling. But when he wasn’t playing he liked to talk.”

“Especially with women,” said Nanette.

“And it was as a result of these conversations that he invited you to join him on the dahabeeyah?”

“Yes. He said it was the only thing that would get him through it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Mahmoud. “Are you saying he didn’t want to go up to Luxor?”

“He hated going on the river at all. He said it was slow and boring.”

“Then why—”

Nanette shrugged. “He said he was doing it only because it was his duty.”

“Duty? I don’t understand that.”

Nanette shrugged again.

The two girls had been fetched by car, the Prince’s car, from the salon and been taken to the river at Beni Suef, where the dahabeeyah had called in for them.

What about the other girl?

A little silence.

“We didn’t know her,” said Nanette.

“She wasn’t one of us,” said Masha.

“Meaning?”

“She was Egyptian for a start,” said Masha.

“What kind of Egyptian? Levantine Egyptian, Greek Egyptian, Italian Egyptian—?”

“Egyptian Egyptian.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. She told us about her family once. Her father’s a big merchant or something. They have a big house. Only she doesn’t live there anymore.”

“Didn’t,” said Masha.

Nanette shrugged again: a sudden, nervous jerk.

“Where has she been living up to now?” asked Mahmoud.

“With an aunt, I think.”

“Do you know where?”

“No.”

“We’d never seen her before,” said Masha, “not till we got into the car.”

“She was already in the car? He’d picked her up first?”

“I suppose so.”

The girl hadn’t said much, then or at any other time. She had kept herself to herself. Owen had the impression that this was the first time for her, as it certainly wasn’t for the other two. From what they said, she had shrunk into a shell from the moment she had got on board, going off by herself whenever she could.

“And that was why she was on the upper deck that night?” asked Owen.

“Yes. She was always up there.”

Mahmoud got them to go through the events of the night. The women had got into the way of going up on the deck every evening. They liked it even if Narouz didn’t. They had sensed the disapproval of the Rais.

“But what’s the point of going up to Luxor if you never get a chance to see anything?” asked Nanette.

What indeed?

“Besides, after being cooped up below decks all day—”

She made a pretty
moue
, which, Owen decided, was probably intended for his benefit.

“You were up there together,” said Mahmoud, unsoftened, “all three?”

“Yes.”

“What were you talking about?”

“What were we talking about? I can’t remember.” The girls looked at each other. “This and that.”

“Did she join in?”

“A little. Not much.”

They had grown so used to her not joining in that they had not really noticed that she had stayed up there when they came down.

“We were hoping we might have a drink before dinner,” said Masha.

“Some hope!” said Nanette.

It was when they were assembling for dinner that they had noticed her absence. They had called up to her. Narouz had even gone up.

“Why he bothered I can’t think,” said Nanette tartly.

They had started the first course without her. Then, as she still failed to appear, Narouz became annoyed and sent the eunuch up to fetch her.

“We thought at first that she had hidden herself deliberately,” said Nanette, “and didn’t bother too much. But then as time went by—”

It all corroborated what they had already heard. Mahmoud probed but came up with nothing more.

“You know where to find us,” said Nanette, getting up. “Any evening,” said Masha, “except Friday.”

Owen put out his hand to stop them.

“Just one other thing,” he said, “before you go. What was her name?”

“Leila,” said Nanette. “That was it, wasn’t it? Leila.”

“Well,” said the Prince, “how are you getting on?”

“Fine. But there are just one or two things I would like to ask you,” said Mahmoud.

“Naturally,” said the Prince, settling back upon the divan. Owen had wondered whether his rooms would be furnished Eastern style or Western style. There was, however, no equivalent of the green motorcar. The room was like any other in the wealthier Cairo houses: carpets on the wall, tiles on the floor, low divans, cushions and very little furniture of any other sort.