The Snake Catcher’s Daughter

Chapter 4

"Hello, Osman,” said Owen. “How is your sister?”

“Sister?” said the orderly. “I haven’t got a sister.”

“That’s funny,” said Owen. “You had one last week.” Osman shook his head.

“Not me,” he said. “You’re thinking of someone else, effendi.”

“I don’t think so. Didn’t you tell Bimbashi McPhee that you had a sister?”

“No, effendi. It was someone else. I’ve never had a sister.”

“The one who was possessed by evil spirits? Who was at the Zzarr?”

Osman swallowed.

“That wasn’t my sister, effendi. That was…my cousin. Yes, my cousin.”

“And was she cured?”

“Oh, yes, effendi, thank you very much. She’s quite better now.”

“Oh good. All the same, these things recur, you know. We’d better take her along to the hospital and get the hakim there to have a look at her.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary, effendi,” said Ocman faintly. “It’s-it’s not worth troubling the mighty hakim.”

“No trouble at all,” said Owen briskly. “I’ll arrange an appointment for her tomorrow. Now, what was her name?”

“Amina,” said the orderly in a whisper. “Yes, Amina. I think.”

“Right. Well, I’ll arrange that and let you know the time.”

“Yes, effendi,” said the orderly, worried.

Owen waited.

“Or perhaps,” he suggested, “you haven’t got a cousin either?”

“Oh, no, effendi,” said Osman hurriedly. “I have a cousin. In fact, several.”

“Make sure,” said Owen, “that it’s the right one who turns up.”

He turned up at the hospital himself to make sure. Osman looked even more worried; indeed, aghast.

He had, however, brought a woman with him, heavily muffled in head veil and face veil and dressed in the usual shapeless black of the poor women of Cairo.

“Greetings, madam,” said Owen cheerfully. “I am sorry to hear about your affliction. But do not worry. The hakim will soon cure you. The treatment may be a bit painful-” The woman gave a twitch.

“-but it won’t last more than a few weeks.”

The hooded figure gave Osman a look.

“Now, I just want to put a few questions to you before you go in to the hakim.”

They would have to be put through Osman, her nearest male relative, but Owen had never yet met an Egyptian woman prepared to stay silent and let the male answer on her behalf. “First, how long have you suffered from this affliction?”

“Six years,” said Osman at random.

“Six years? Are you sure it isn’t five years?”

“Six,” said Osman.

“But you haven’t asked her yet.”

Osman did so now. The woman muttered something back which sounded suspiciously like “How do I know?”

“Perhaps it was five,” said Osman.

“Quite a long time, anyway. So that all the world will know of your affliction. There will be no doubt, then, when I ask people-”

“Ask people?” said Osman.

“Your family-”

Osman nodded but looked grim.

“The local hakim-”

Osman winced. This was going to cost him.

“The neighbours-”

Osman drew a deep breath. Things were getting out of hand.

“How sad that you should be so afflicted!” said Owen sympathetically. “And that all the world should know! And what a price you’ll have to pay,” he said to Osman, “to get any man to take her! I’d be surprised if you could get anyone to marry her at all.” There were signs of stirring beneath the shapeless black. “Never mind,” he said encouragingly, “when everyone knows you’ve been to the English hakim to be cured of not being quite right in the head-”

“Not quite right in the head?” said the woman.

“Permanently afflicted-”

“There’s nothing wrong with my head,” declared the woman firmly.

“Hush, woman!” said Osman unhappily.

“There may be with yours!”

“Don’t let it worry you, Amina,” said Owen.

“Amina?” said the woman.

Back at the Bab-el-Khalk, severely cast down, Osman was ready to confess. None of his female relatives, the mock-Amina-for whom, win or lose, he had committed himself to buying a necklace-least of all, unfortunately, was possessed or weak in the head. There never had been anyone possessed. It was just a story he had made up knowing the Bimbashi’s interest in such things as Zzarrs.

Even that, Owen pointed out, was untrue. He had not made the story up. Someone else had; and given it to him to use to entrap the Bimbashi.

Osman was silent. The worried lines on his forehead, however, indicated that he could see big trouble ahead.

“So who was it who spoke to you, Osman?” asked Owen pleasantly.

Osman took a deep breath.

“Effendi, I do not know.”

“What a pity you do not know!” said Owen. “It could have saved you a lot of distress.”

“A man spoke to me in the suk,” tried Osman bravely.

“Whom you did not know and whom you could not recognize if you saw him again.”

“That’s right, effendi,” said Osman thankfully.

“And out of the goodness of your heart you decided to entrap the Bimbashi?”

“Well, it wasn’t just out of the goodness-” admitted Osman.

“How much did they pay you?”

“One hundred piastres.”

Owen looked at him severely.

“I will give it back, effendi,” said Osman despondently.

“But how will you give it back, Osman, if you don’t know the man and would not recognize him if you saw him?”

“Perhaps I would recognize him,” said Osman, “and I might see him in the suk.”

“Well, I’ll tell you what I will do, Osman. You have raised your hand against the Bimbashi and that is a serious offence, for which I am going to send you to work in the gangs mending the levees along the river. However, I shall postpone your departure for a week or two and if meanwhile you should happen to see the man who spoke to you and are able to point him out to me I might be prepared to take things no further. Oh, and, Osman, no one need know that you had pointed him out to me.”

Osman looked at him thoughtfully.

Where, Owen asked himself, could he find out if another Zzarr was being held in the immediate future? It was not something he could discover through his usual intelligence sources. Why was that, he wondered? He suddenly realized that all his sources were to do with men. The Islamic world was severely bifurcated between a public world and a private world. The public world was occupied only by men. This was the world he knew and his agents were concerned with. It was a world rather like that of the army, in which all the players were men and all the initiatives were masculine.

Women belonged to the other world, the private world. They existed behind walls, behind closed doors. When they emerged into the public world, they carried the walls with them in the form of their black, shapeless garments and heavy veils. The Zzarr was part of that private world. Worse-from his point of view-it was part of a subdivision of that world, a subdivision from which men were excluded. There was another world within the private world which belonged to women only.

It would be no good asking his agents. They were all men. Nor could he ask the orderlies. The Zzarr was something women kept from their husbands. They might have a vague idea, but it would be at the level of rumour and gossip. He could not even go to Sheikh Musa. The religious authorities took care to keep their distance from such things. They were obliged to tolerate but could not recognize.

He remembered, a few months before, witnessing one such women’s ceremony. It had taken place in a mosque, now abandoned but to which women still came for their own special purposes. The purpose of this particular ceremony had been to establish whether a child would grow up dumb. Mothers came and held their babies to a special part of the wall. If they cried-and they usually did, their mothers made damned sure of that-prospects were favourable.

The religious authorities knew very well that such practices went on. They did not condone them but knew they could not stamp them out. They were part of an incredibly resilient female underworld.

About which Owen knew virtually nothing. That was all right, people were entitled to their secrets and he wasn’t one to go prying into them like McPhee. Mamur Zapt he might be, but he had a decent British sense of reticence.

On the other hand, he wanted to get in touch with the person who ran the Zzarr; the witch, or whatever she was. Witch! Owen winced. That would look good in the newspapers: Mamur Zapt out hunting for witches! He could write the editorials himself.

Yes, the fact was, he had a gap in the information system. His informants were all men. He needed to have some women.

But how could he find them? Women were kept well away from him, why, he could not think, and the only one he knew at all well was Zeinab. He could ask her, but she was not exactly a person he could employ as an agent. It wasn’t just that she would be certain to take a line of her own, never mind what the instructions were. The problem was that she was a member of Cairo’s social elite and had far more in common with sophisticated Parisiennes than with her sisters in the suk.

He could ask Georgiades’s Rosa, even though she was still only about fifteen. She was as sharp as a knife, an implement which she had made clear she was ready to use should her husband step out of line. Georgiades had been a changed man since his marriage. The trouble with Rosa, though, was that she was Greek. There was certainly a very strong Greek female culture. Unfortunately, it was not the same as the traditional one of the suks.

There was a nice girl he had recently met. In fact, she was the one he’d gone to the abandoned mosque to meet. The problem was that she was too nice. She was much too kind and gentle.

That could not be said of another of Owen’s acquaintances. That gipsy girl was just the sort of person he needed. Unfortunately, she had left town in a hurry a few weeks before, just ahead of the police.

No, it wouldn’t do. He would have to recruit women by the ordinary means. Nikos handled all that side. Nikos? Women? That wasn’t going to work. He would have to put aside the issue of recruiting women for the moment.

But what about the Zzarr? He mentioned it tentatively to Zeinab.

“I’ve no time for that superstitious stuff,” she said dismissively. “Women are never going to get anywhere while they go on believing that sort of rubbish.”

“Gareth,” said his friend, Paul, the ADC, “does the name Philipides mean anything to you?”

They were at a reception at the Abdin Palace. Owen, splendidly uniformed, had just mounted the grand staircase lined by the Khedival royal guard, even more splendidly uniformed and carrying lances. Owen did not greatly care for such occasions-for one thing, they served only soft drinks-but he was here at the express invitation of His Royal Highness the Khedive and one did not disregard such invitations. The British were punctilious in observing the forms of Khedival rule. Substance was another matter.

The Khedive, too, was punctilious over observance of the forms. They were all he had left.

“I think he does it just to provoke,” said Paul. “This evening, for instance: why so splendid an occasion just to mark the arrival of the Turkish ambassador?”

“Past relationships, I suppose,” said Owen. The Khedive had once been a vassal of the Sublime Porte and Egypt was still, in the view of Constantinople, part of the Ottoman Empire. “Past,” asked Paul, “or future?”

“No chance,” said Owen. “We wouldn’t let him.”

“Quite so,” said Paul. “But he does love to raise the spectre.”

He had taken Owen by the arm and led him behind some potted palm trees; and it was then that he asked about I’hilipides, and whether any of it made sense.

Owen nodded.

“Good. Because it didn’t to me.”

“And now it does?”

“I have been brushing up on past history. At the C-G’s request,” Paul said with emphasis.

“Why is that?”

“He thinks it’s going to come up again.”

“The corruption business?”

“The Garvin business.”

“On what grounds?”

“Miscarriage of justice. They were convicted only on Garvin’s word.”

“There was a police officer-”

“One of Garvin’s subordinates. Coerced, so they claim.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

“We don’t know. All we know is that the Parquet wants formally to reopen the whole affair.”

“Philipides is out,” said Owen.

“Yes. Early. I don’t know if that’s cause or result. Possibly it’s just the pretext. Anyway, someone’s using it to have a go at Garvin. And what we are beginning to think is that it’s not so much Garvin they want to have a go at, it’s us.”

“Garvin just a pretext, too.”

“Exactly. So, old chap, the Consul-General would like you to take a look.”

“Have you tipped off Garvin?”

“He’ll soon find out. But we can’t ask him to handle this. He’s a material witness. Besides-”

“Yes?”

“This really is political. It really is.”

Paul caught someone’s eye and went across to shake hands. “ Cher ministre,” Owen heard him begin. Then he, too, began to do his duty, circulating less among politicians and diplomats-that was Paul’s patch-than among senior civil servants and Pashas. They were all, of course, Egyptian, but the language spoken was not Egyptian Arabic. Nor, significantly, was it English. It was French. The Egyptian elite’s cultural allegiance was to France. It went to France for its education, its reading, its clothes and its vacations. It spoke French more naturally than it spoke Arabic.

When he was with Zeinab they habitually spoke French. Zeinab’s father was here now on the other side of the room with a circle of his cronies. He extended a hand to greet Owen as he arrived.

“My dear boy,” he said. “So nice to see you! You know everyone, don’t you?”

They were all Pashas; like him, hereditary rulers of vast estates. Nowadays they were deeply into cotton and international finance (borrowing, mostly). They looked outward to Europe, where they spent most of their time, adjusting to the loss of power which had come with British rule. They supplied most of the Khedive’s cabinet but their capacity for action, or, indeed, inaction, was severely constrained now by the presence of British Advisers at the top of each Ministry. Nevertheless, Governmental posts were much sought after, not least by Nuri, Zeinab’s father, and his cronies. They belonged, however, to a previous generation; a fact to which they were by no means reconciled.

They were all known to Owen, except one.

“Demerdash Pasha,” introduced Nuri, with a wave of his band.

The Pasha bowed distantly.

“Captain Owen. The dear boy has a tendresse for Zeinab,” he explained.

“How is Zeinab these days?” asked one of the other Pashas.

“The Mamur Zapt,” he heard another one amplifying for the benefit of the newcomer.

Owen saw the impact.

“Mamur Zapt?”

A little later he found an opportunity to speak to Owen.

“I knew your predecessor,” he said.

“A friend?”

“We worked together. A true servant of the Khedive.”

“As I aspire to be,” said Owen.

The Pasha looked puzzled.

“How can that be?” he said.

One of the other Pashas linked arms with him affectionately.

“Demerdash Pasha has been away for a long time,” he said with a smile.

“And where have you been spending your time, Pasha?” asked Owen.

“Constantinople,” the man said shortly.

“Demerdash Pasha is a great friend of the Turks,” said one of the other Pashas.

Demerdash turned on him.

“I am not a great friend of the Turks,” he said sharply. “I was there because the Khedive asked me to be there.”

“You are a friend of Egypt, mon cher,” said Nuri.

“Yes,” said Demerdash, “a friend of Egypt. But of Egypt as she was and not as she is.”

“Oh la la,” said Nuri, and led him away.

“Just the same as he used to be,” said one of the other Pashas, watching them go. “He doesn’t give an inch.”

“Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” said another Pasha.

“That remains to be seen,” said the first Pasha.

The group broke up with Nuri’s departure and Owen continued his circulation. Some time later, however, he found himself standing next to Nuri and Demerdash at the buffet table. They were talking to someone who had, apparently, just returned from the Sudan.

“And how were things down in the Bahr-el-Ghazal?” asked Demerdash.

The other man shrugged. “Hot,” he said.

“What about women?”

“All right.”

“That was where the best slaves came from,” said Demerdash. “Beautiful black ones.”

“None of that these days. They’ve got rid of slaves.”

Demerdash made a gesture of dismissal.

“Does it make any difference?”

“You’ve got to be careful.”

“The British!” said Demerdash scornfully.

“All the same-”

“Don’t tell me you spent that time there without sampling at least a few little negresses.”

“What’s that?” said Nuri.

Demerdash turned to him.

“ Il me dit qu’il a passe six ans au Sudan sans une seule petite negresse!”

“Impossible!” said Nuri.

The table bowed under the weight of food. There were gigantic Nile perch with lemons stuffed in their jaws, pheasants cooked but then with their feathers replaced so that they looked as if they had just wandered off an autumnal English field, ducklings shaped out of foie gras, huge ox heads from which the tongues, cooked, lolled imbecilely.

Paul regarded these latter with disfavour.

“Exactly like a Parliamentary delegation,” he said sourly.

The reception finished about eleven. The night was still young by Cairo standards and many of the guests went off to revel less stiffly in more congenial places. Owen decided to walk home. The other side of rising with the light was that he declined with the light, and midnight always found him totally stupid.

Besides, the night was the best time for walking in Cairo. The city was at its coolest then. Shadow veiled the strident and the angular and cooperated with the moon to emphasize the soft shapes and arches. The lower level of the city disappeared and you suddenly became aware of the magical beauty of the upper parts of the houses, with their balconies and minarets, the fantastic woodwork of the overhanging, box-like meshrebiya windows, and the grotesque corbels which carried the first floor out over the street. Higher still and the moon revealed more clearly than in the day the delicacy of the domes and minarets of the mosques and the slender towers of the fountain houses. Everything was silvery. The moon seemed even to strike silver out of the fine, tight-packed grains of sand of the streets.

As Owen set out, an arabeah drew up alongside him. He waved it away but it stopped just in front of him determinedly.

“Hello!” said a soft female voice, which somehow seemed familiar. Suddenly he remembered.

“You again!” It was the girl he had found in his bed. “What do you want?”

“I want you to be nice to me. And I want to be nice to you.”

“Sorry,” said Owen. “I’m well supplied, thanks.”

“It’s not like that,” she said.

“What is it like?”

“Why don’t you come home with me and find out?”

“Sorry.” He shook his head. “Someone is expecting me.”

“Zeinab’s not the only girl in the world. And, anyway, she’s not expecting you. She’s at Samira’s.”

Owen stopped, astonished. How did a girl like this know about Samira, the Princess Samira? And how did she know about Zeinab, for that matter?

“You know Samira?”

“As well as I know you. Surprisingly well.”

Owen considered the matter. He was intrigued.

But then, he was intended to be intrigued.

“No, thank you,” he said, and walked on.

Later, he was sorry. Plums, after all, do not grow on every tree.

Owen went down to the Gamaliya next day to see that things were all right. He found the shop open and the Copt busy behind the counter. The shelves, though, were half empty.

“A lot missing?” asked Owen, indicating the shelves with his hand.

“No, no. I’ve just not put them up. I have to take them down at night, you see, now that the shutters have been broken. It’s not worth it. The women know what they want and can always ask for it. I keep the stuff inside now.”

An idea came to Owen.

“Do you talk to the women?”

“Of course.”

“And sometimes, perhaps, you overhear things?”

“Perhaps,” said the Copt, slightly bewildered.

“Did you know about the Zzarr?”

He caught the look before the Copt’s face became studiously blank.

“Zzarr? I don’t think so.”

Owen smiled.

“ I think so,” he said.

The Copt shook his head.

“The reason I am asking,” said Owen, “is that I think the Zzarr could have something to do with the attack on your shop.”

The shopkeeper looked surprised.

“How could it?”

“Just believe me, that I think it could. Now, what I’m trying to do is stop it happening again. So I need to know.”

“I know there was a Zzarr,” said the shopkeeper. “That’s about all I know. Honestly!”

“Where was it?”

“It was in the house over there.”

“Show me.”

The Copt called into the house and a woman appeared. She was dressed in black like the other women in the street and veiled like them. The Copt told her to look after things while he was gone. He said he wouldn’t be long.

“Normally she doesn’t mind,” he said to Owen. “It’s just that now-”

The house was only about a couple of hundred yards away. Owen knocked on the door. No one responded.

“I think it’s empty,” said the Copt.

“Who does it belong to?”

“A Mr Abbas, I think. He lives in the Gamaliya somewhere.”

There were still some policemen about. Owen set them to work finding out where Mr Abbas lived-it was simply a question of knocking on people’s doors and asking, someone was bound to know. He himself went to a cafe to wait. The Copt, he sent back to his shop.

Eventually, one of the constables returned. Or rather, two of them returned. One was the man who found out; the other was Selim, who had now, on the strength of past glory, appointed himself Acting Sergeant, still, unfortunately, unpaid.

Mr Abbas owned a large store off one of the suks. He came out to meet Owen and then invited him into his office to take tea. They sat on a low leather divan and the tea was served on an equally low table, about six inches high. Courtesy demanded that it was some time before they got down to business, but eventually they did.

“My house, indeed,” said Mr Abbas blandly, “and sometimes I let it. But a Zzarr! Oh dear, I had no idea.”

“They gave no indication of their purpose?”

“Well, of course, I don’t handle it myself-”

The person who did, an agent who managed several properties, lived on the other side of the Gamaliya. It was another hot day and by the time Owen had reached him, his clothes were wet with perspiration. He was received again with courtesy and tea; and again given the run around.

“Well, of course, I had no idea what they wanted it for. A celebration of some sort, I believe they said. Too large for their own house so they wanted to hire a bigger one.”

“Do you have their names?”

The agent spread his hands regretfully.

“I’m afraid not,” he said.

That was unlikely, Owen remarked.

“They pay the money first,” the man said, smiling. Owen got nowhere. He walked back to Bab-el-Khalk with Selim, dripping.

“The Gamaliya’s a no-good place, effendi,” said Selim, commiserating. “Now, over by the fish market, where I live-” Owen stopped in his tracks.

“Selim,” he said, “are you married?”

“Well, yes, effendi,” said Selim, taken aback. “There’s Leila, and there’s Aisha, and there’s-”

He began, however, to look troubled.

“Effendi,” he said hesitantly, “I don’t think they’d be good enough for you. Not yet. I mean, I’m trading up. In a bit, I’ll divorce Aisha, and then I’ll look out for someone a bit classier. In fact, I know a girl already who would do. She would just suit-

“No, no, no, no!” said Owen hastily. “Not that at all.”

He explained what he wanted.

Selim listened carefully.

“Well,” he said, “Aisha’s the one. She’s a bit of a bitch, that’s why I’m thinking of getting rid of her. Nag, nag, nag all the time, just come back late and you’re in trouble. But she’s got a good head on her. Mind you,” he looked worried, “it could give her ideas, she would start getting above herself-”

“There would be money in it,” said Owen. “For you.”

“Well, in that case-” said Selim, brightening. He thought it over. “Yes,” he said, “Aisha’s definitely the one. She could say she was possessed by an evil spirit, all right. In fact, it wouldn’t be too far from the truth…”