The Bride Box (21 page)

‘Is that what you told him?' said the Greek admiringly.

‘Well …' said the clerk, tempted. ‘No,' he admitted. ‘Not exactly.'

‘More than your job's worth?'

‘Exactly!'

‘But once it was all settled, you'd have thought …'

‘You would. You would have thought he'd have gone home, instead of fussing around. But he didn't. He had to go over it all again, making sure everything was as it should be. Not just the lot that had just come in, but everything else! Fussing around. And what made it worse was that he had sent me off.'

‘Sent you off?'

‘Yes. Before we'd even got back to the warehouse. Just like that: on a whim. He'd seen some kid or other out with her mother and wanted me to follow her and find out where she lived! Now, if it had been the mother, I'd have understood. She was a real looker. But a kid! I mean …!'

‘He's not …' said the Greek, hesitating. ‘One of those?'

‘Not as far as I know. As I say, I'd have thought the mother was more in his line. But you can never tell with him. He's full of quirks. Whims. I don't know what it was all about but he had me follow them. And then when I got back, he wanted to know all about it. Where they had gone, that sort of thing. Well, they'd gone to have an ice cream, like any sensible mother would when she'd got her kid hanging about her on a hot afternoon.'

‘Did you tell him that?'

‘Well …'

‘You should have. Probably not got any kids himself so wouldn't know.'

‘That could well be true.'

‘Not got any family of his own?'

‘I wouldn't think so. Going off on those long journeys of his all the time. What woman would stand it?'

‘Maybe that's why he wanted to know? To find out what ordinary life was like?'

‘Seems a funny thing to do to me. But that's what he did. Sent me off after them. And, you know, he'd made such a fuss earlier about the consignment and the way it was handled. Me at the front, him at the back. And then he sends me away after some kid!'

‘A nutter!' judged the Greek. ‘They're all like that, these bosses.'

‘Well, this one is a prize specimen.'

‘Look, how about that coffee? I can see this must all have been a strain for you.'

‘So now you've got it all in,' said the Greek over coffee, ‘is that it for a while?'

‘No. It's got to go out again. In a few days' time.'

‘Have I got it wrong, or did you say it had to go to a madrassa?'

‘You've not got it wrong. The one round the corner.'

‘Round the corner? Why didn't they take it there in the first place, then?'

‘Safer in the warehouse, I suppose. You don't want it hanging around in the madrassa. They've only got the one room in the mosque.'

‘And the kids, I suppose. They'd have it to bits in a moment.'

‘Don't say things like that! My hair's grey enough as it is.'

‘Well, once it gets there, it's out of your hands, anyway.'

‘That's right. And not a moment too soon.'

The clerk couldn't stay long. There was always the chance that Clarke Effendi would come round.

‘Keeps you up to the mark, I can see.'

‘It's only for a short time. Then he goes away again.'

‘He doesn't fuss around at the madrassa?'

‘Once it gets there, it's not his concern.'

‘Moves on, I suppose. Quite quickly. You say they've not got much room there.'

‘That's right.'

‘Why bring it here, then? I take it that it's for other places as well as the madrassa. Other madrassas, I suppose. Tables and chairs, that sort of thing.'

‘They could certainly do with some. Although I'm not sure it's that. Clarke Effendi doesn't always tell me.'

‘I'll tell you what I think it is,' said the Greek. ‘It'll be part of all the money the government is spending on schools. Too much, in my view.'

‘And in mine …'

Georgiades, sweating in the heat, padded patiently round the corner to the madrassa the clerk had mentioned. It was in a mosque, as Nassir had said. Not strictly in it, but on the steps in front of it, where other people, too, besides the teacher and his pupils, had gathered beneath the pillars in the shade. The pupils at the moment were young children, gripping their slates tightly. From time to time the teacher would pause in his recitation and get them to write a text, usually a verse from the Koran. They would hold up their slates to show him and he would check to see that they had got it right. For it wasn't simply a matter of getting the letters and spelling correct, it was also doing justice to the Holy Word.

Behind them, on the outskirts of the group, were older boys not involved for the moment but waiting more or less patiently for their turn. And behind them, also sitting on the steps, were a lot of casual onlookers, talking quietly among themselves but benefiting, too, from hearing the Holy Words.

‘Good words!' said the Greek, sitting down with his back to a pillar and mopping his face.

One or two of the people around him nodded. He tried to draw them into conversation but found their talk hard to follow. They weren't very forthcoming, either, so after a while he abandoned the attempt. Sitting there with his back to the pillar in the heat, among the gentle hum of the teacher's words, and the conversation around about him, he dozed off.

When he awoke he heard people talking. They were different people from the ones he had been sitting by before; they were more talkative. They were talking about beds, a congenial topic for Georgiades just at the moment.

They came from outside Cairo. You could hear it in their voices. But he wasn't at once able to place them. Then he caught the work ‘
angareeb
'. An
angareeb
was a sort of rope bed, more common in the south of Egypt than in the city, but not unusual among the less well-to-do. There were no springs, no bottom layer, just rope, interwoven to form a comfortable, slatted surface, without even the give of a hammock.

Now they were talking about
andats
. He knew vaguely what they were, although again the word was unfamiliar. A foreign term for a foreign thing. You didn't find them in Egypt. Thank goodness, for they appeared to be a species of stink bug: a sort of winged louse, from what he could make out. If you trod on one it gave off a most abominable smell. Sometimes they fell into the soup.

Soup? Had he misheard? No, they were talking about a child who had swallowed one by mistake. They had to call a 
hakim
, a doctor.

Georgiades didn't like the sound of this and was glad when they turned to another topic. It was, however, another medical matter. One of the speakers apparently had marital difficulties. He blamed his wife. She blamed him. Whoever was to blame, the problem appeared to be that appetite was inadequate.

‘Why don't you try trocchee shells?' someone suggested.

Trocchee shells?
Georgiades came suddenly awake.

‘What do you do?' said the afflicted man doubtfully. ‘Swallow them?'

‘No, no, not just like that. First you grind them into powder. The Saudis are always doing it.'

‘Trocchee shells? I don't think that sounds very nice. Not to eat, I mean. Hey, wait a minute! That's another thing with a nasty smell, isn't it? Are you having me on?'

‘No! No, apparently it works a treat. In Saudi they're all trying it.'

‘Dirty bastards!'

‘I know someone … five times a night!'

‘How do you get hold of it?'

‘There's a chap round the corner … His boss is big in it … Trocchee shells, I mean. That's what he trades in. You make them into buttons.'

‘Trocchee shells?'

‘That's right.'

‘But how do you …?

‘No, no, normally they just get made into buttons. But in Saudi Arabia, apparently, they grind them into powder, and then away you go!'

And now Georgiades got it.
Angareeb
,
andat
, trocchee shells, the way they spoke … The people here were all Sudanese.

Mahmoud was to be put on to another case. ‘Why?' he asked.

‘Mercy,' said his boss. ‘Why should you fry in the sticks when there's work to be done here?'

‘I don't like to leave it unfinished …'

‘You're not. According to what you say in your report, you've about finished it already. It's just waiting for us to pick up this bloke Suleiman, and our friends in the Sudan will do that for us. They'll send him here and he'll sing sweetly and after that it's only a matter of picking up some hooligans in … what was the name of the place, if it has a name? Denderah. And any fool can do it. We'll send someone down. We might even get the police to do it. They cock up most things but they ought to be able to manage a simple arrest. It's just manhandling. You've done all the brain work.'

‘Yes, but …' said Mahmoud weakly. ‘It's not
quite
wrapped up yet …'

‘It will be,' said his boss confidently. ‘When you get this bloke Suleiman here.'

‘It will be me that gets to question him, will it?' asked Mahmoud.

‘I expect so,' said his boss vaguely. ‘Anyway, it will be brought to court, so you'd better start pulling things together. Wasn't there a bride box in it somewhere?'

The bride box had all this time been resting quietly in the yard at the Bab-el-Khalk, the police headquarters where Owen had his office. It had been left sufficiently far away from the main building for the smell to be manageable and it had become less unpleasant with the passage of time. At first, people had wondered what it was doing there but as the days passed they ceased to wonder and took it so much for granted that they hardly saw it. If anyone raised a question they were given the answer: ‘The Mamur Zapt has decreed it,' which stopped argument.

One day Zeinab had to go in to the Bab-el-Khalk on an errand for her father. It was a trivial errand, a misplaced form or something, to do with her father's taxes. Nuri Pasha tried to avoid having anything directly to do with the tax authorities, and usually sent any tax return via Owen in the hope – misguided, of course, as most of Nuri's financial dealings were – that it would impress or even cow the Egyptian Finance Ministry. Owen always sent it on immediately without comment. Nothing good ever resulted from Nuri's tactics but he clung to them in hope. What, after all, was an eminent son-in-law (or might-be son-in-law) for? Believing that Owen was still away in the south, he decided on this occasion to make use of his daughter's service instead.

Zeinab, who, although cavalier with finances, especially her own, knew something about the way the system worked under the British, warned him that nothing would come of it and that he would do far better to get a good accountant. But Nuri shrank from accountants, particularly ones who knew what they were doing and who might discover what he had been doing, and persuaded her to keep to the usual time-honoured ways of Egypt. He even put a wad of notes in her hand, which she gratefully accepted but knew better than to use for the purpose he intended. Nuri Pasha was also a great believer in the personal touch, especially when it was delivered by a pretty girl. And what were daughters for, etc …?

Zeinab had nothing better to do that afternoon so agreed to go to the Bab-el-Khalk, stipulating, however, that all she would do would be to deliver the letter. ‘Drop it on a desk.' Nuri Pasha had sufficient confidence in his daughter to believe that even dropping a letter on a desk would have an impact if it was done by her.

She took Leila with her. She had got into the way of taking her on brief expeditions and quite liked the experience of walking along hand-in-hand with the little girl.

When they entered the yard at the Bab-el-Khalk Leila saw the bride box and at once burst into tears. She broke away from Zeinab and rushed over to it.

‘It's Soraya's box!' she cried. ‘And it's all dusty. They haven't been looking after it properly!'

One or two orderlies standing nearby moved hastily away at this point. Nikos looked out of a window and then quietly closed the shutters.

McPhee, the eccentric but tender-hearted Deputy Commissioner, came out of his office and gave her a square of Turkish delight. ‘It's all right, it's all right!' he said, distressed. ‘It will clean up!'

‘But it ought never to have been allowed to get like this!' cried Leila.

‘It's evidence, you see, and evidence shouldn't be tampered with,' said McPhee.

‘It's
not
evidence. It's Soraya's box!'

‘I suppose it would do no harm if it was dusted …' said McPhee weakly. He looked around. ‘Ya Hussein!' he called to an orderly sitting in the shade.

‘Effendi,' said Hussein, springing up smartly.

‘Dust the box!'

‘Dust the …? began Hussein incredulously.

‘It's dirty.'

‘Well …'

Hussein pulled himself together. ‘Ya Ali!' he called.

‘Ya Hussein?'

Ali was, of course, the other half of the Hussein/Ali act. He came running – well, walking – round the corner.

‘Dust the box!' said Hussein.

‘Dust the …?'

‘I will do it!' said Leila.

‘Now, wait a minute, this is man's work. You can't just take a man's work away. Not like that. What am I going to live on? What about my family. My wife? My children?'

‘Just bloody do it!' said McPhee.

‘
I
will do it!' said Leila. ‘Can I have a duster?'

‘Ali …'

‘Oh, all right,' said Ali, going back into the building. He emerged with a soft chamois leather, bright yellow duster.

Then he saw the box. ‘It's that bride box again!' he said, taken aback.

‘Soraya's,' said Leila.