The Mamur Zapt and the Night of the Dog

‘The Parquet, then?’ suggested Owen hopefully.

‘The Mamur Zapt,’ said Nikos definitely, and put on his tarboosh and walked out of the door.

Owen put on his tarboosh, too. Although he was still, strictly speaking, an army officer and merely on secondment, he considered himself now to be a civilian and preferred to dress in mufti. A tarboosh, the pot-like hat with a tassel which was the normal headgear of the educated Egyptian, was far less conspicuous than a sun helmet, especially of the heavy military sort. It was also cooler.

Not that that mattered too much this early in the morning. Later, when the sun was high in the sky and the temperature rose into the nineties, every little thing counted. Even the nature of your hat. At the moment, though, with the sun not long up over the horizon, the day was still pleasantly fresh and cool.

Owen borrowed a couple of constables from the orderly room at the front of the building and set out after Nikos.

They went on foot since their way lay through the mediaeval city, where the streets were too narrow and congested for a carriage to pass. This early in the morning the streets were not, in fact, very crowded. Almost the only people they saw were the black-gowned women drawing water for the day from the street pumps, but by the time they reached the Coptic Place of the Dead there were a lot more people around, and when Owen looked behind-him he found that Nikos was not the only guide. From somewhere or other they had acquired a sizeable following of small boys and old men and others who might have been on their way to work if something more interesting had not come along.

Without assistance, although not necessarily on such a scale, Owen would never have found the House of Andrus, for it was set back from the ordinary thoroughfares of the necropolis and masked on all sides but one by huge family tombs. Once it came in sight, however, there was no mistaking it. A large crowd, mostly in the traditional dark gowns and dark turbans of the Copts, had already gathered around its front entrance. As Owen approached, the crowd parted and a man came up to him.

‘This is an outrage!’ the man said.

‘An unfortunate incident, certainly,’ said Owen smoothly. Nikos had been able to brief him on the way.

‘More than that,’ said the Copt, ‘much, much more than that.’

‘Don’t let your distress—’

‘They are trying to provoke us,’ the man cut in.

‘They? Who?’

As soon as he had spoken, he could have cursed himself. For he knew what the answer would be.

‘The Moslems,’ said the man. ‘The Moslems. They are behind this.’

‘Nonsense!’

It was important to stifle such ideas at birth. Cairo was an excitable city.

‘Who else would have done it?’

‘Children. Boys.’

‘Children!’

‘Yes. For a joke.’

‘You call this a joke?’

‘No. I say only that it is the sort of thing children would do as a joke.’

‘We know who did it,’ said someone in the crowd, ‘and it wasn’t children.’

‘Nor was it a joke,’ said the man who had spoken first. ‘It was done to provoke us.’

‘So you say.’

‘So I know,’ the man retorted.

‘How do you know?’

‘This is not a thing in itself. It is part of a pattern.’

‘There have been other things?’

‘Yes.’

‘What things?’

‘Attacks on Copts in the streets. Women jostled on their way to church. Our priests spat on, children stoned.’

‘These are all bad things,’ said Owen, ‘but that is not enough to make a pattern.’

‘What more do you want?’ asked the man. ‘Someone killed?’

‘In a pattern,’ said Owen, ‘there is design.’

‘There is design here. Do you think these things happen by chance?’

‘Women have always been jostled. Boys have always thrown stones.’

‘But not like this,’ said the man. ‘Our women dare not go out. We keep our children at home.’

‘There have been many such incidents?’

‘Every day and increasingly.’

‘In one part of the city or in all?’

‘At the moment,’ said the man, ‘in one part of the city only.’

‘And that is?’

‘We are from the Mar Girgis,’ said the man. The Church of St George, in the old part of the city, Owen thought. He had walked past it on his way to the cemetery.

‘It is around there, is it?’

‘Yes.’

He became aware that the man was watching him closely.

‘If you do not do something about it,’ the man said, ‘we shall.’

The crowd went quiet. Owen suddenly noticed how much it had grown. It must be over two hundred. And with that realization came another. Not all of them were Copts.