And that put another complexion on it. There were plenty of people in Cairo with something against the Mamur Zapt. But why come down to Denderah to attack him? In Cairo it could be done more easily and less obtrusively. And who was it, anyway? Owen began to run through the list — the rather long list — of those who might have a score to settle.
Owen began to stalk the stalker. It wasn’t easy to do it without being observed. There weren’t that many Europeans in the crowd thronging the square. But one of the few was the man he was trying to keep an eye on, and he stood out as much as Owen himself did.
At first the man seemed nonplussed when he lost sight of Owen, but after hovering about uncertainly for a moment or two he seemed to shrug and move away. Owen followed him as he went through the bales of gum arabic. He seemed to be checking numbers as much as their condition. But then a train of camels moved between them and he lost sight of the man.
It left Owen with a feeling of discomfort and puzzlement. He hadn’t expected this, not out of Cairo.
SEVEN
Owen had called Nikos, the official clerk, and told him to find out what he could about the trader, Clarke, and one day a fat, slovenly dressed Greek came up to the warehouse from which Clarke operated when he was in Cairo.
He wasn’t in Cairo very often, the clerk in the warehouse explained to the Greek when he inquired. In fact, he had just missed him. He travelled a great deal, mostly in Upper Egypt, visiting suppliers of gum arabic and seeing how the trees they harvested were doing that year. He liked to see the stocks before buying them, and then he often accompanied the caravan to Denderah from where they were distributed throughout the Sudan and Egypt and often, these days, abroad. He always took particular care when the gum was going abroad as he wanted to be sure that it was not adulterated on the way. Quality, Clarke had emphasized, was important in foreign markets. And the Sudanis — and indeed anyone who lived in Upper Egypt — were not wholly to be trusted. Clarke Effendi was always having trouble with someone or other. He had often said to Fuad, the clerk in the warehouse, that unless you stood right over them, they were always up to something. So Clarke Effendi was often away standing right over them.
The Greek said that things were not that different in Cairo. The clerk agreed and said that he personally had to keep a sharp eye on the men who worked in the warehouse. Clarke Effendi had enjoined him to keep a particular eye on stock loss through pilfering.
‘Of gum arabic?’ said the Greek, surprised. ‘Wouldn’t that be hard to steal?’
‘No, no, not gum. That is in great slabs and would not be worth the effort. But Clarke Effendi also trades in other things and they are more stealable. Trinkets for the bazaars. Jewellery for the unwary. And, of course, trocchee shells.’
‘Trocchee shells?’
‘Oh, yes.’ It was big business. Shells from Egypt and the Sudan went all over the world. He, the Greek, would be surprised at the places the shells went to: Europe, Italy, especially, America — New York was the place — and even India and China. Clarke Effendi was always saying that he ought to pay a visit to the Far East. A visit, he claimed, would certainly double sales there. But so far he had not gone.
They went round the corner to continue their chat over a cup of coffee. The Greek was good at chatting. His big, brown, sympathetic eyes invited confidences. That was why Owen employed him. Georgiades was his name.
He gave confidences in return. Mostly about his wife, whom he loved dearly but who terrified him. She was a business woman. Well, yes, that was unusual, but she was an unusual woman. A whiz at figures. That sort of thing always made Georgiades himself uneasy. She played the Cairo Bourse, the Egyptian Stock Exchange. When Georgiades had first found out, he had been paralysed with fear and demanded that she stay at home like a decent woman and look after the children.
‘On your money?’ she had said. ‘We couldn’t even afford to buy them shoes!’
This, unfortunately, was true, and he had agreed to let her continue. But only for a short while and with the tiniest of sums. And never, never, never was there to be any risk.
‘Sure, sure, sure!’ said Rosa, but the Greek was not entirely convinced that she followed his instruction. (‘Women are like that,’ said Fuad.)
Anyway, the children always seemed to be well off for shoes, so Georgiades thought it best not to enquire too closely. And then there was the question of the house.
‘House?’
They had just, at Rosa’s insistence, moved into a yet bigger one. Georgiades had torn his hair.
‘But the cost!’ he had wailed. ‘How do I find the money?’
‘I’ll find the money,’ said Rosa.
‘But how?’
‘I’ll double the trade.’
Georgiades didn’t know what this meant but he didn’t like the sound of it.
‘Is there not risk?’ he had asked timidly.
‘Oh, yes,’ said Rosa. ‘But I’ll cover that with a reverse trade.’
Georgiades didn’t like the sound of this, either. In fact, it terrified him.
And the warehouse clerk, too. ‘May Allah preserve you!’ he gasped.
Georgiades hoped he would but rather doubted it. ‘I shall end up in prison!’ he had wailed.
‘You will, but I won’t,’ said Rosa cheerfully. ‘It’s all in your name, so I’ll still be able to look after the children.’
‘The wickedness of women!’ cried the warehouse clerk, his sympathies totally engaged.
‘The trouble is,’ said Georgiades, ‘she takes on riskier and riskier things! Arms, for instance …’
‘Ah, well,’ said the warehouse clerk, ‘that’s where the real money is.’
‘And even’ — Georgiades leaned forward and whispered — ‘slaves!’
‘That’s where the money is, too,’ said the clerk. ‘Or so people say,’ he added hurriedly.
He wouldn’t say any more, but Georgiades was satisfied for the time being. He went back to the Mamur Zapt’s office at the Bab-el-Khalk and told Nikos. Nikos thought it was coming along nicely.
During the long, increasingly painful ride back to Denderah, Mahmoud had had the time to do more thinking. At first the thinking had been to do with the case. He had built so much on what he had seen as the near certainty of the clerk being able to identify the men who had come to the railway station carrying the bride box. And now it had all fallen apart! He went over it in his mind. What had gone wrong? Had the clerk simply been mistaken? Or had the men not come from the Pasha’s estate as they claimed? Had it all been an attempt to mislead, to put an investigator on the wrong track? But from the clerk’s account of what they had said, that seemed unlikely. He was back to the clerk again and the question of his reliability.
He went over it again and again, getting nowhere. His thoughts just went round and round. Had they ganged up on him as an outsider? The city man who’d come to put the fellahin right? Was that how they had seen him? In a way, he could understand it if they had. But if they had, they were being unjust. He wanted to help them. He was bringing law into lives where the only law was that laid down by the Pasha. Backwardness. His thinking began, in the heat and his fatigue, to fall into familiar patterns. A man like Mustapha, for instance, selling his own children into slavery!
It was poverty, of course. Living in Cairo, Mahmoud was used to poverty. But what he was seeing in the south was something new. The complete poverty in the houses! The absolute lack of possessions — beds, even. Eating off the floor! The very water they drank had to be carried from the well or from the river. Even the smallest necessity cost labour.
And even though the men worked hard in the fields, back-breaking work under the sun, much of the work, the work that made everything run, was done by women. Not much scope for a life there, he thought.
He thought of Soraya seizing a few moments to put together the things for her bride box. Every single thing had had to be created in the few moments spared from the ordinary labour of the house and the village.