‘So?’ said the leader of the workmen.
In the nick of time it came to Owen.
‘Such wisdom should not lightly be set aside!’ he said sternly.
‘Well, no, but-’
‘Choose three men from among you.’ That should take some time. ‘Let them sit with me and with the omda ’-best to put him on the spot-‘and with the man of God’-that should take care of him — ‘and then let us take counsel in front of you all.’
‘But that will take-’ began the sheikh.
‘Effendi, the body-’ said the omda worriedly.
‘Rightly spoken! There is a need for haste. And therefore let the choosing of the men begin.’
He walked purposefully aside. The members of the crowd looked at each other hesitantly.
And then began choosing.
Phew! thought Owen.
Across the fields wove a column of women in black, ululating as they came.
‘So,’ said the Consul-General’s ADC, as they sat sipping their drinks on the verandah of the Sporting Club, ‘you referred it to committee?’
‘Instinct,’ said Owen. ‘My years of experience with the Egyptian bureaucracy have taught me that’s what you do with a crisis. Fortunately, the Parquet arrived soon afterwards and I was able to hand it all over to them.’
‘A pity,’ said Paul, reflecting, ‘since you were already involved.’
‘Ah, but that was by accident. It’s really nothing to do with me at all. Not the sort of thing I handle.’
He stopped.
‘Already?’ he said.
‘Actually,’ said Paul, ‘that was what I wanted to talk to you about.’
Salah-el-Din, the mamur of the new city, was waiting for him at the gate of one of the few houses that had been completed. It was a surprising house for an inspector of police, large, white-stuccoed and Indo-European in style. But the Syndicate had insisted on the house being in keeping with the character of the others in the development.
The new city was targeted at the very wealthy, who, apart from benefiting from the purity of the air, would also benefit from close proximity to the ruler of Egypt, the Khedive, who had a palace at Kubba.
The city was not built yet and it was pushing things to appoint a mamur this early, but the syndicate behind the development had requested it in the interests of community relations, which was very splendid, and had offered to pay the mamur’s salary for the first two years, which was even more splendid.
They had gone so far as to put forward Salah-el-Din’s name. Garvin, the Commandant of the Cairo Police Force, was normally against that sort of thing, but Salah was a bright young chap and due for promotion and they would need someone special for the job anyway. The Khedive could be relied on to make difficulties; and the Syndicate’s wealthy clientele would certainly feel that they merited especially sophisticated policing.
Salah-el-Din, it was suggested, was just the man for the job. Unusually for an Egyptian, he had trained abroad, not, it was true, as a policeman but as some sort of lawyer (he had come unstuck in his examinations, which was why he had descended to become a policeman) and spoke French well enough to be able to liaise with the Syndicate (which was Belgian).
Owen knew very little about him beyond the fact that he played tennis. Rather well, in fact, as Owen had discovered a few weeks ago when he had played against him during a tennis party got up by the Consul-General.
‘Where did you find him,’ he had complained afterwards to Paul.
‘His name was suggested by the Baron.’
‘Baron?’
‘The one we’re sucking up to this afternoon, silly!’
Consulate tennis parties were rarely without political purposes. The Baron was the wealthy Belgian behind the Heliopolis Syndicate. Wealthy financiers who took an interest in Egypt were much to be encouraged.
A week or two later Owen had been invited to make up a doubles at the Sporting Club. The invitation had come from Raoul, a Belgian he had met at the tennis party and who was something to do with the Syndicate, and the other two were Paul and Salah-el-Din. It was then that Salah had issued his own invitation to Owen.
‘Come over,’ he had said, ‘and you can see how it’s all developing. The tennis courts should be ready by next week-they’re building a big new Sporting Park. Why don’t you come and christen them?’
Why not, indeed? And Owen had been on his way the day before when he had been so annoyingly diverted.
He made his apologies.
‘Not at all, my dear fellow!’ cried Salah-el-Din, leading him through the garden and up on to the verandah, where a jug of lemonade was waiting. ‘It was all very nearly rather nasty, I gather?’
‘Not so much nasty as irritating,’ said Raoul, already sitting at the table. ‘We lost a whole day! Actually,’ he said, correcting himself, ‘it could have got nasty. We have the Mamur Zapt to thank that it didn’t.’
He gave a polite half-bow in Owen’s direction.
‘What was it all about?’ asked the other member of the party carelessly. He was, Owen gathered, the son of a Pasha.
‘Trouble between the labourers and the villagers,’ said Salah-el-Din.
The Pasha’s son sat up.
‘Villagers?’ he said. ‘Have they been making a nuisance of themselves?’
He probably thought the villagers belonged to him. Which, until recently, they may well have done.
‘No, no,’ said Raoul. ‘It’s our own men.’
‘Actually,’ said Owen, ‘it was a body on the line.’
‘They could have moved it, though, couldn’t they?’ said Raoul, turning to him. ‘From what I gather, that was at the root of the trouble. If they’d let them take the body away there wouldn’t have been any bother!’
‘They were thinking of legal requirements, I believe,’ said Owen.
‘They were thinking of how they could get the day off!’
‘Put a body on the line?’ said the Pasha’s son.
‘No, no, I wouldn’t go so far as that. But make the most of it when there was a body on the line.’
‘They’re up to all sorts of tricks,’ said the Pasha’s son.
‘Well, I wouldn’t put it past them. We’ve been having some real problems with them lately. That’s where we’re hoping you’ll help us,’ he said to Owen.
‘I don’t reckon to intervene in labour disputes,’ said Owen.
‘What do you do?’ asked the Pasha’s son. ‘I’ve often wondered.’
‘I handle political things.’
‘But this is political!’ said Raoul. ‘There are some agitators who’ve got amongst them and we want you to root them out.’
‘The employers always think there are agitators,’ said Owen. ‘There seldom are.’
‘There are this time!’ declared Raoul. ‘We can identify them.’
‘We-ell-’
‘Oh, I know what you’re thinking. But we can prove it. There have been meetings between them and known Nationalists.’
‘Even if there have,’ said Owen, ‘that doesn’t constitute a crime. Nor, actually, does agitation.’
Raoul looked disappointed.
‘I must say I was hoping you’d take a different line. This development is very important to us. And to the country.’
‘Damned right!’ said the Pasha’s son.
‘We’ve spoken to your boss, the Consul-General-’
‘I work for the Khedive,’ said Owen.
‘We know all about that. As I say, we’ve spoken to the Consul-General-’
Government in Egypt was a thing of shadows. The formal ruler of Egypt was the Khedive and he had a government which answered to him. But since the British Army had stepped in, thirty years ago, to assist him to put down a rebellion, and then stayed, behind every Minister was a British Adviser and behind the Khedive was the British Consul-General himself. Government was a thing of shadows; but which was the substance and which was the shadow?
‘Yes,’ said Owen, ‘so I gather.’
‘Well, then-’
‘I’ll look into it.’
‘Thank you,’ said the Belgian, relieved. ‘That’s all we ask.’
‘However, I must repeat: I don’t reckon to involve myself in labour disputes.’