A Cold Touch of Ice

2

Only four of the bales had guns concealed in them. When they had opened them all, they found a total of fifteen rifles and six revolvers; numbers which Owen found puzzling. Gun-running or gun-using? The numbers were too small for the former and large for the latter – there were assassination attempts all the time, but they seldom involved more than two or three people.

And then there was another puzzle: where they had been found. In the house of an Italian. Gun-running in Egypt at the moment was from the Sinai peninsula to Tripolitania, from the Turks to their allies fighting against the Italians. What sort of Italian was it who would be arming enemies against his own kind? He could think of plenty of people who might for one reason or another, for profit or for patriotism, be running guns; but the one national group that wouldn’t be, just at the moment, was the Italians.

But then, neither would they be smuggling guns in order to prepare for some armed raid or assassination attempt. It wasn’t from foreign nationals that such attempts came; it was from nationalistically-minded Egyptians.

One thing, however, was clear.

‘It looks,’ he said to Mahmoud, ‘as if I’ll be joining you in your investigations.’

Sidi Morelli had been an auctioneer. For some reason that Owen could not fathom, many of the auctioneers in Cairo and Alexandria were Italian. The counting at auctions was often done in Italian: uno, due … Strangely, that was not always so at the auctions conducted by Sidi Morelli himself, whose business included both an up-market end, based upon hired premises in the Europeanized Ismailiya Quarter, and a down-market end held in a tented enclosure close to the Market of the Afternoon, where proceedings were conducted totally in Arabic.

When Owen went there the following day he found a few people poking round the various lots stacked at one end of the enclosure while the sundry Levantines who normally assisted Sidi Morelli stood about uncertainly. An auction had been scheduled for that morning but then, since instructions had been lacking, had been abandoned.

‘No, I don’t know when it will be held.’ one of the Levantines was saying to a rather crumpled-looking Greek. ‘Yes, I know you’re looking for cotton, and, yes, we do have some in our warehouse, but the Parquet are crawling all over it and I don’t know when they’ll be finished.’

‘It’s raw cotton, is it?’ said the Greek.

‘Yes.’

‘And slightly damaged? That’s what the man told me last week.’

‘Yes, it’s slightly damaged. That’s why we’ve got it and why it’s not going to the cotton market.’

‘Do you think I could go to your warehouse and take a look at it?’

‘I wouldn’t if I were you. Not just at the moment. As I said, the Parquet are all over the place –’

‘The Parquet? What are they doing there?’

‘I told you. Our boss has just died and –’

‘Do you think there’s any chance of a reduction?’

‘For the cotton? Look –’

‘Yes. You know, to get rid of it. Not have it hanging about on your hands. While they’re working out the estate.’

‘Look, he’s only just died!’

‘Yes, but –’

‘No!’ said the Levantine in a fury. ‘No!’

The Greek moved away.

‘These bloody Greeks!’ the Levantine said to Owen. They’re so bloody sharp, they cut themselves!’

An Arab dressed in a dirty blue galabeah came in under the awning.

‘Louis,’ he said to the Levantine, ‘is there any chance of the angrib?’

He pointed to a rope bed in one of the lots.

‘Sidi said I could have it if you didn’t sell it this time, and I’ve got a customer waiting.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said the Levantine. ‘If it’s not gone twice there’s no reason to suppose it would go the third time.’

‘Thanks.’

The Arab called a porter, who picked up the bed and walked out with it across his shoulders.

The Arab hesitated.

‘If I sell it, you know –’

‘That’s all right,’ said Louis.

‘I wouldn’t like the Signora –’

‘That’s all right.’

‘We let the stallholders have the stuff we can’t sell,’ the Levantine said to Owen.

The Greek returned.

‘I’m looking for a baby-chair, too.’ he said.

‘Baby-chair!’

‘You know, one of those high chairs that kids can sit in.’

‘We don’t have any baby-chairs.’

‘It’s for when they get big enough to sit up at table.’

‘Yes, I know what a baby-chair is. But we don’t have any. Not here. We wouldn’t have any. People around here sit on the floor. Babies too.’

‘Oh!’

The Greek seemed cast down.

‘Maybe our other place –’ said the Levantine, relenting.

‘Other place?’

‘We’ve got a place up in the Ismailiya. That’s where we put the better-quality stuff. It’s brassware, antiques, mostly, but occasionally we get some European furniture. You could try there.’

‘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.

Times, too. Owen guessed that they had retraced Sidi Morelli’s movements pretty exactly. Their arrival at the table might had been arranged to coincide with the moment when Sidi Morelli had reached it the previous night. Similarly, their departure might well have coincided with his. He had got up and left the table, shaking hands, as was the Arabic custom, with everyone else in the coffee house and then set off round the corner and along the Nahhasin towards his house.

And exactly here, where a little, dark alleyway ran off between the houses, someone must have been waiting for him. They had probably been standing in the darkness of the alleyway and then, as he had passed, reached out and pulled him into the shadow and strangled him; so quickly and efficiently that he had not had time to utter a cry or make a sound loud enough to catch the attention of those seated in the coffee house not twenty yards away. And then they had fled, almost certainly up the alleyway.

‘Well, yes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘Except that there were some porters further along the alleyway hauling up a bed and they claim that no one passed them.’

He led Owen down the alley. At its far end the blank walls of the big houses of the Nahhasin gave way to tenements. From some of the upper storeys came the weak light of oil lamps. They could see the window through which the bed had been hauled. Its frame was still out and beneath it, on the ground, there were still some bulky objects awaiting their turn to be lifted.

‘There would have been a lamp up there,’ said Mahmoud, ‘and possibly one on the ground, where they were working.’

‘Pretty dark,’ said Owen, looking round, ‘even so.’

‘But narrow,’ said Mahmoud. They are sure they would have seen him. Still, I think it more likely that he escaped along here than that he went down the Nahhasin. I asked the men who found the body and they were positive that they had met no one coming away from where Morelli had been killed. The alleyway seems somehow much more likely.’

They retraced their steps.

‘It all happened in about five minutes,’ said Mahmoud. ‘From the time he left the coffee house to the time they found him.’

‘How was he killed?’

‘Strangled.’

‘Not garotted?’

‘No.’

‘Quick, then.’

‘No money was taken,’ said Mahmoud.

‘No money? But then –?’

‘He was killed for some other reason.’

Owen didn’t like the sound of that. He hoped that Mahmoud would soon find a reason, some private, personal motive, rooted in family, perhaps, or in business. The alternative opened up too many disquieting possibilities. ‘One of us’ Morelli may have been; but had he been ‘one of us’ enough, at a time when war was placing such a new, heavy stress on old identities and relationships?

There was a reception at the Abdin Palace that evening and Owen, as one of the Khedive’s senior servants, was bidden to be there. Although there were plenty of other Englishmen in the Khedive’s service – the whole British Administration, nominally, for a start – he was, in fact, one of very few Englishmen present, an indication of the chill that had come over the relationship between the Khedive and the new British Consul-General. The absence was all the more marked because the reception was for someone who was to all intents and purposes an honorary Englishman.

Slatin Pasha had entered the Khedivial service some thirty years before and had been appointed governor of a province in the Sudan. During the Sudan uprising he had been taken prisoner and had been a slave of the Khalifa for eleven years. His famous escape, made with the help of the British Intelligence, had led to him becoming the darling of the British public. He had paid many visits to Windsor and been showered with honours by the Queen, including a knighthood. He was just the man you would have expected the Consulate to turn out for; and yet no one was there.

Slatin was very keen on honours and the reception was in recognition of him collecting yet another one a short time before, this time from Austria. Slatin was himself an Austrian and had naturally been pleased. All the same, he was not entirely happy about this evening.

‘It won’t do, Owen, it won’t do,’ he said, looking around him. ‘It’s bad if His Lordship wasn’t invited to something like this.’

‘Perhaps he was invited and just didn’t come.’

‘Then that’s bad, too. Countries should come together in Egypt even if they have their differences elsewhere.’

‘Not always easy,’ said Owen.

Slatin looked at him in his sharp, bird-like way.

‘Especially it is not easy for people like you and me,’ he said.

Owen suddenly wondered about Slatin. He was the most Anglophile of Anglophiles; and yet he was also Austrian. If the two sides started pulling apart, how would he react? Which would he choose?

‘Dilemmas, dear boy, dilemmas!’ said Slatin, and scurried away.

And how far would their common service to the Khedive, to Egypt, that most cosmopolitan of countries, containing so many different nationalities, be able to hold the strain?

Across the room he saw Ismet Bey talking to – this was surprising, you hardly ever saw a woman on an occasion like this – a tall, blonde woman, about thirty. No veil, either; she must be foreign.

Later in the evening, one of the German attachés caught him by the arm.

‘Come over, Owen. There’s someone I’d like you to meet’

It was the girl.

‘Fräulein von Ramsberg; the Mamur Zapt.’

‘Ah, the Mamur Zapt!’ said the girl, as if she knew about Mamur Zapts.

‘Fräulein von Ramsberg has just completed a crossing of the Sinai desert. On camel.’

‘Good heavens!’ said Owen.

‘But you yourself, who have lived so long in this part of the world, have no doubt made similar journeys?’ she suggested.

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘No?’

‘I do occasionally go out of Cairo. Reluctantly,’ said Owen.

The girl laughed.

‘You are a city man. Well, there are different sorts of Arabists. I am a desert one.’

‘I do admire people like yourself who make these long, arduous journeys.’

This wasn’t entirely true. In fact, it wasn’t true at all. He thought they were crazy. He had done some camel-riding, which he had found most uncomfortable, and quite a lot of horse-riding, especially in India; but on the whole he preferred sitting in cafés.

‘Fräulein von Ramsberg has a request to make,’ said the attaché.

‘I wish to make a journey, and I wondered if you would give me a firman.’

A firman was a kind of permit.

‘Where are you going?’

‘I want to go west out of Cairo and then drop down to the top of the Old Salt Road.’

‘That’s quite a journey!’

She laughed.

‘That’s the kind of journey that I like.’

Her English was very good.

‘Well, rather you than me.’

‘You wouldn’t like to come with me?’

‘No, thanks!’

‘A pity. Just the firman, then.’

‘Actually, you don’t need a permit to go there.’

‘Nevertheless, a letter of some kind from you would, I am sure, be of great help.’

‘If you wish. But I don’t think it will help much down there.’

‘Does not the word of the Mamur Zapt strike terror into men’s hearts in even the most remote parts of Egypt?’

‘I very much doubt it. When are you setting out?’

‘At the end of the week.’

‘Well, I’ll get it to you before then. And perhaps in return you would like to accompany me on one of my sorts of expedition?’

‘I very much would,’ said Miss von Ramsberg.

‘You great dope!’ said his friend, Paul.

‘Dope? Why?’

‘Agreeing to give her a letter of recommendation.’

‘It’s just a letter!’

‘It will have your name on it, won’t it?’

‘Yes, but it’s not even a firman!’

‘That’s something we ought to think about introducing,’ said Paul. ‘A firman for people like her.’

‘People like her?’

‘What do you think she wants to travel in Egypt for?’

‘She likes travelling. She’s just crossed the Sinai peninsula –’

‘Yes, I know. Another of these great camel-riders. Pain in the ass, all of them. They upset the local tribes, get killed or kidnapped, and then you’ve got to spend a lot of time – and money! – looking for them.’

‘She seems to have managed it all right without any of those things happening.’

‘Oh, sure! Competent, too. Well, if she’s so competent, how come she lost her way?’

‘Lost her way? I didn’t know that.’

‘The Sinai is one of those areas which, being a border region, does require a firman. When she applied for hers she had to specify a route. Which she then did not follow.’

‘Well, hell, all kinds of things –’

‘She didn’t make any attempt to follow it. She didn’t go anywhere near it. Instead she followed the route that Saladin took against the Crusaders.’

‘Yes, but –’

‘Which is likely to be the route if anyone else was invading Egypt.’

‘Invading!’

‘It would take the Turks a matter of days to get to the border.’

‘She’s not a Turk, she’s –’

‘A German. Yes, I know. And the Germans are building the railways which are going to help them get to the border.’

‘Paul, you don’t mean –?’

‘Yes, I do.’

The Mamur Zapt’s remit was confined to Egypt and he did not follow very closely what was happening beyond its borders. He thought, however, that Paul was making too much of this. It was unlike him to be so alarmist; but perhaps now that he was working so closely with Kitchener, as his Oriental Secretary, some of Kitchener’s own alarmism with respect to anything beyond his borders was rubbing off on him.

‘We can’t be sure, of course,’ Paul said now, softening slightly, ‘but just in case she is, we oughtn’t to go out of our way to encourage her!’

‘It’s just a letter!’

‘Can you write it in such a way as to lead to information coming back as to where exactly she is?’

‘I’ll try.’

‘She’s in Cairo for the best part of a week. It would be interesting to know what she’s up to while she’s here.’

‘Well, as a matter of fact –’

He had given her a choice of two places: the Semiramis, which had a dining room with a romantic view over the river, and the Mirabelle, which was a French restaurant in the noisy Arab Mouski. She chose the Semiramis; Owen would have chosen the Mirabelle.

‘But then I am romantic,’ she protested.

‘Is that what brought you out to these parts?’

‘Yes. But not in the way that you think. There are two sides to being a romantic the side that gets you bowled over by the moon on the water, and the rebellious side. It was that other side that led to me coming out here.’

‘Who or what were you rebelling against?’

‘My family. The life they were charting for me – the life of a rich woman in Germany. My family are’ – she grimaced – ‘respectable. We have an estate. The men for generations have been soldiers, the women, soldiers’ wives. Which means you spend your whole life in boring garrison towns. And then you retire to your boring estate. And it is all so predictable.