‘They keep you going in the fields,’ said one of the men.
‘Yes. But it’s at a sensible pace. On this job they make you go faster than you’d like.’
‘That’s because they want to get it finished. The Khedive, they say, has fixed the day he wants to travel on it.’
‘Why can’t he wait a bit?’
‘He’s got some big do on, I expect.’
‘Well, if he wants to travel to the city, why can’t he go by coach and horses, the way he’s always done?’
‘He’s in a hurry, I suppose.’
‘All he needs to do is set out earlier. Then he’d get there at the same time.’
‘Ah, but that’s not it. Speed’s the thing today.’
‘Well, I don’t see why we need it.’
‘You’re a man of the past, Abdul. Egypt’s bursting into the future. Or so they say.’
‘Well, I wish they’d burst without me. There’s no point in working this hard. It’s worse than when they had the curbash!’
The curbash was the heavy whip the Pashas had used to force labour. One of the first acts of the British when they arrived had been to abolish it.
‘You wouldn’t want the curbash back, would you?’
‘I don’t reckon it’d make much difference.’
‘I reckon you’d feel the difference!’
‘ Curbash, money, it’s all the same,’ remarked another of the labourers. ‘It’s all a whip held over the head of the poor.’
Mahmoud had been allowed to address them during their break. This was another bone of contention. It was usual in Egypt to work till early in the afternoon and then, if you were an office worker or a labourer, stop for the day. Shopkeepers would work again in the evening when it became cooler. The Syndicate, however, had insisted that the workforce on the railway work through till late afternoon, stopping for a brief break at noon when the sun was at its hottest.
The men were sitting in the shade now, eating their bread and onions.
‘Ibrahim found the work hard, so they say,’ said Owen.
The leader of the workmen looked at him.
‘Do they?’
‘Yes. In the village. They say he used to get home too tired to do anything.’
‘He used to do his share.’
‘It’s not entirely true, though. There was a woman he used to go to.’
‘Was there?’
‘He didn’t speak to you about it?’
‘No.’
‘I expect he saved a bit for that,’ said one of the workmen. ‘You’d do that, wouldn’t you, Abdul?’
‘I bet he’d work fast enough then,’ said another of the men. ‘There’d be no need for someone to be standing over him with the curbash when it comes to that kind of work!’
There was a general laugh.
‘Why wouldn’t you let them move the body?’ Mahmoud asked the leader.
‘He was murdered, wasn’t he? You could see it. His neck was broken.’
‘You wanted the Parquet to take a look at it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’
‘That’s what they’re supposed to do, aren’t they?’ retorted the man.
Which was certainly true. Only it was a little surprising that the man should be so punctilious. Few Egyptians would have been. The Parquet was-in Egyptian terms-relatively new, having been created only some thirty years before when the government, anxious to introduce a modern legal system, had simply translated the French Penal Code and adopted it and French legal procedure lock, stock and barrel. Many Egyptians still harked back to the system which had preceded it and which had prevailed for centuries, a system of village watchmen, ghaffirs, and in which the local mudir, or governor, was judge, jury and, frequently, executioner. The Mamur Zapt had been part of that system, which accounts for the fact that the Matariya villagers had heard of him but not of the Parquet.
Yet here was someone, ordinary labourer and probably a villager, invoking the absolute letter of the-for many Egyptians-still newish law!
It was a small thing, perhaps, but it set Owen’s mind wondering. He knew little about employment law (and was damned sure that very few Egyptians did) and not much about labour disputes. Maybe it was different in the more modern industries.
Maybe the workers’ leaders there did know something about the modern legal system. Maybe that was why the workmen, very sensibly, chose them.
Perhaps he was making too much of it. He looked at the workmen’s leader. He was a youngish man in his thirties, with a thin, sharp face and a wiry body. He was certainly intelligent.
The doubt began to niggle at Owen’s mind again. Too intelligent? He did not know what the workmen in Egypt’s newer industries-the railways were, of course, one of Egypt’s newer industries-were like but suspected that they might well be sharper than the average. But that would surely be true only of the more skilled trades, the engine drivers and signalmen and repairmen. It wouldn’t necessarily be true of the labourers working on the track.
He was probably making too much of this. Only the Belgians had spoken of agitators, and he had dismissed it as the kind of thing foreign contractors would say. And so far he had seen absolutely no sign of this man being an agitator in their sense. He had directed attention to a body, that was all, and insisted that the due process of the law should be observed. Nothing wrong with that; it was just that in Egypt, a country of many murders and much casualness about death, it was a bit unusual.
He reproached himself. A man did exactly as he was supposed to do and it struck him as odd! What were things coming to!
The niggle, however, remained. What it came down to was, why had the man done it? Normal zeal for the public good? Compassion for the dead man, anger at the killing of a friend? Or could it be, could it just be, that someone saw in the death an opportunity to exploit the situation for their own ends, that the Khedive’s charges of political manipulation on the part of the Nationalists were not entirely without foundation?
The men finished their break and went back to their work. Mahmoud, lunchless, set out for the village. He was probably the only man in the Parquet, and, possibly, Cairo, who reckoned to work through the heat of the day.
Owen took a buggy back to the Pont de Limoun and then an arabeah up to the Ismailiya Quarter, where, among the ‘butterfly shops’, he hoped to find Zeinab.
The ‘butterfly shops’ were open only in the season and were kept by dressmakers, milliners and purveyors of general unnecessaries who had come over from Paris specifically for the occasion. Fashionable Egypt was oriented heavily towards Paris, and the goods were the latest in the Paris shops. They were also the most expensive in the Paris shops and Owen frequently wondered what Zeinab was doing in them. She received an allowance from her father, a wealthy-or so she claimed-Pasha. He denied it, but then these things, thought Owen, were relative. A dress from one of the ‘butterfly shops’, which cost more than Owen’s pay for the whole year, probably seemed like nothing to him. He could deny his daughter, his illegitimate child by his favourite courtesan, nothing. Not that it would have done much good if he had, she would simply have gone ahead all the same, bought it and charged it to his account.
Owen walked into the most likely shop and stood dazed and uncomprehending among the dresses. When it came to shopping, Zeinab reckoned he was good for lunch and not much else.
Yes, said the assistant, she was in the shop. She was trying on a dress and would be with him shortly.
‘ Monsieur desire une boisson, peut-etre?’ said the assistant.
Yes, Monsieur did desire une boisson, and stood sipping it while he waited for Zeinab.
Several other assistants were in the shop, ladies of considerable beauty and indeterminate nationality and all of them dressed in black. Nearly all of them wore veils, in deference to Muslim susceptibilities. Not too much deference; the veils were thin and filmy and suggested as much as they concealed.
There were, however, some women in traditional dress, wearing long, black, shapeless robes which came down to their feet and long veils which covered their head-the hair was a particularly erotic zone for Arabs-and came down to their waists. They stood incongruously among the skimpy and revealing European fashions, apparently as out of place as Owen himself.