The Quest of Julian Day (19 page)

‘I don't,' I smiled.

‘All right, then. When you've got Harry's clothes on and have collected a tarboosh nobody's likely to pay much attention to you. Just to show there's no ill-feeling, come and have a cocktail with me here to-morrow evening at six. I'd like to see you again before you risk yourself in that place of Gamal's.'

‘Does that mean you've abandoned your theory that I'm probably a crook?'

‘Not necessarily. There are nasty crooks and nice ones and
I don't mind entertaining the more pleasant variety providing they don't actually try to do me down.' With the suggestion of a smile she left me and disappeared into the hotel.

From the rank in the square I took one of the ancient open carriages, called
arabiehs
, that ply for hire in Cairo at all hours. It was not far to the cheap
pension
where Amin had taken a room for me but on the way the gentle clopping of the old horse's hoofs nearly sent me to sleep and by the time I had climbed to a third-storey room my legs were almost giving under me.

It was over sixty hours since I had woken in my cabin on the morning of the day that Sir Walter was murdered. That night I had only four hours' sleep and nearly twenty-four hours later I had managed to snatch another three hours in the Tomb of the Bulls. For the last thirty hours I had been a hunted man and continual excitement had sustained me, but now I was all in; pulling off my clothes I flopped into bed, sinking at once into a deep and dreamless sleep.

It was after midday when I woke; the streets of Cairo were dangerous for me and, since there was nothing I could do until the evening, I just turned over and dozed for the best part of the afternoon.

The bathing accommodation at the
pension
was far from being all that I could have wished, but I made do with it and, much refreshed by my long sleep. I dressed myself in Harry's clothes and went out to make a few purchases.

I got a bright-blue, soft-collared shirt, a tarboosh, a green tie with white camels printed on it and a ghastly pair of lemon-yellow leather shoes with long, pointed toes. I then drove to Groppi's, the famous
patisserie
in the Sharia Kasr el Nil where I purchased two boxes of their huge chocolates for Sylvia and Clarissa and let myself go on a fine selection of sweets for myself. My eyes have always been bigger than my tummy when let loose in a good sweet-shop and, although I knew quite well that I should never be able to eat them all, I could not resist buying my favourite fondants, caramel moue, almond brittle, nougat, fruit jellies and violet chocolate creams, and I had positively to drag myself away or else I should have left with another half-dozen boxes.

Returning to the
pension
I put on my new items of attire
and, regarding myself in the spotted mirror over the old-fashioned, marble-topped washstand, congratulated myself upon my appearance. Harry's clothes were not too conspicuously full round the waist but both the sleeves of the coat and the bottoms of the trousers were a good couple of inches too short for me which made them look like ready-mades. With my yellowish complexion and flashy haberdashery I now looked a typical middle-class Egyptian and no one, I think, would have suspected that I was an ex-member of His Britannic Majesty's Diplomatic Service or a product of Eton and Oxford.

The only thing that bothered me was a slight cold. Like a fool I had not troubled to dry my feet properly after getting them soaked when wading through the cotton-fields with Sylvia the previous evening and it looked as if I was going to pay the penalty of my carelessness.

When I arrived at the Continental the terrace was crowded with a hundred or more people sitting over their evening drinks and watching the multi-coloured life of Cairo pass in the street below. Clarissa and Harry were at a table with Sylvia. Harry recognised his own coat as I came towards them but the two girls looked quite startled for a moment until they realised the identity of the flashy young stranger who bowed before them.

My green tie with the camels on it caused quite a lot of laughter, but I was not too conspicuous as at least half the men on the terrace were Egyptians wearing tarbooshes with European clothes and I might quite well have been a minor official or a merchant who had been asked along to discuss some deal in the jewels or antiquities which make up so much of Cairo's trade with wealthy European visitors. The chocolates were accepted with cries of glee by Clarissa and more appreciation than I had expected by Sylvia, although, I learnt later, she rarely ate sweets.

She was looking pale and tired; quite evidently feeling the reaction from the day before and beginning to realise fully the fact that she had really lost her father. To distract her from her grief as much as possible during the day I learnt that the Belvilles had made her show them some of the sights.

Harry found Cairo disappointing; a shoddy, second-rate capital, he called it; and it is quite true that although it has many fine modern buildings these are much too dispersed to
be effective. Even in the main streets they are so often separated by blocks of tawdry shops, and the hundreds of fine old mosques, in which lie the city's true glory, are invariably surrounded by the tumble-down structures of the poorer inhabitants.

Clarissa, however, was thoroughly enjoying herself. She had bought every sort of useless nonsense in the Mouski that morning. The narrow alleyways and long, dark shops of the Bazaar had intrigued her so much that neither Sylvia nor Harry had been able to persuade her that she could buy the same sort of junk cheaper in Birmingham or Hamburg.

In the afternoon they had visited old Cairo where the three religions have been practised side by side in amity for centuries. At the Jewish synagogue they had seen the oldest copy of the Torah in the world, said to have been penned direct from that which was kept in the Temple of David at Jerusalem. In the Coptic Christian church they had visited the tiny crypt believed to have been the place where the Virgin sheltered with the Holy Child during her flight into Egypt. But the Mosque of Amr seemed to have intrigued Clarissa even more particularly the story that one of its three hundred and sixty-six columns had travelled all the way through the air from Mecca upon being struck by Mohammed with a whip and that the Faithful believe the whole mosque will fly back there one last Friday in the month of Ramadan. Although normally deserted, its great courtyard is packed to suffocation with thousands upon thousands of believers on each of these holy anniversaries.

‘Just think of it!' she said. ‘The whole thing rising up into the air like some huge magic carpet and whisking away across the desert down the Red Sea.'

‘And wouldn't the people in it have a fit if it did!' Harry grinned. ‘Now darling, you've talked quite enough nonsense. Let's hear what Julian intends to do if he's still set on making this mad expedition tonight.'

‘There's nothing much to tell you,' I said, ‘because my plans are quite nebulous. All I know is that Gamal's place is part of the dope-distributing organisation and I'm going to pass the evening there on the off-chance that I can find out a little more about it.'

‘What time do you expect to get away?' Sylvia asked.

‘Goodness knows. I may not even get in, but If I do I shall stay as long as possible.'

‘Well, we're dining at Jimmy's,' she announced. ‘So if you do get slung out or get away by a reasonable hour, perhaps you'd like to come on there.'

‘I envy you,' I said. ‘His curried prawns are the best food in Egypt, but I doubt if I'll be through before midnight. If I find out anything that's worth while I'll telephone you whatever hour it is and we'll arrange a meeting. If not, we'd better meet here at, say, ten-thirty tomorrow morning.'

‘What d'you want us to do if you fail to turn up?' Harry asked anxiously.

‘If that happens I don't suppose I shall be terribly interested but as you're to see the police in any case, they'll doubtless do their best to find my mangled corpse.'

‘Don't, Julian!' exclaimed Clarissa.

‘Sorry,' I laughed. ‘I was only joking. It's a thousand-to-one against my running into anyone at Gamal's who would know me and I promise you I'm the very last person to get myself into trouble for the mere fun of the thing.'

Harry ordered another round of champagne cocktails but our conversation had become disjointed and uneasy. All three of them made half-hearted attempts to persaude me to change my mind about going to Gamal's but I was pig-headed and, since my project looked like spoiling their evening, I decided that the best thing to do was to drink up and leave them. Harry made me promise that I would ring up whatever hour I got back and they all wished me luck.

I was by no means so certain as I had made out that I would not run into bad trouble and while I was dining alone at a small restaurant I had a distinct attack of cold feet. But I knew this was my last chance of striking at O'Kieff so like it or not, I had simply got to take it.

I gave myself till half-past eight, then I made my way along Mohammed Ali Street and entered the second turning on the right. The district was by no means a pleasant one and it was thereabouts that numerous British officers had been assassinated during the troublesome times when the Egyptian Nationalists were adopting terrorist tactics in order to secure Home Rule for their country.

I found the carpet shop without difficulty. The door was shut but I could see a light gleaming through its lattice, so I banged upon it loudly and after a moment an Arab in a white
galabieh
opened it, standing there quite silently while he waited for me to state my business.

‘Is Gamal
Effendi
in?' I asked, and he nodded.

‘Who wishes to see him, master?'

‘He would not know my name,' I said. ‘But tell him, please, that I come from Yusuf Fakri.'

‘
Ayoua
,' he bowed. ‘Please to step in and wait here.'

He shut the door behind me, slid-to the bolt and left me standing in the dimly-lit shop. A number of rugs were hanging on the walls and at the back of the place there were several of the looms at which one sees small boys busily hand-weaving in the day-time. In the centre of the floor there were two great stacks of carpets nearly three feet in height and I formed the impression at once that the place was not merely a blind but that a genuine carpet business was conducted there.

After a couple of minutes the servant returned and led me upstairs to his master; while we went through the usual Arab greetings I took quick stock of the dope-trafficker.

Gamal was a fat, heavy man of fifty-odd with grizzled hair showing at the sides of his head where it was not covered by the tarboosh. His skin was dark and slightly pitted, doubtless from smallpox in infancy. There was nothing particularly villainous-looking about him but I noted that his eyes were very quick and lively. The room in which he received me was obviously his office and that in itself seemed rather a give-away; it was much too well-equipped with every sort of Western business gadget to belong to the owner of the musty, old-fashioned carpet shop downstairs.

‘You come from Fakri?' Gamal said, pushing a box of cigarettes across his desk towards me.

‘Yes,' I replied. ‘My name is Daoud el Azziz, and I am Yusuf's cousin. He has the fever tonight and has sent me in his place.'

I knew from the list I had seen on Oonas' desk that a man called Yusuf Fakri was due to collect a packet of dope from Gamal that night and I was taking a big risk in passing myself off as Yusuf's cousin; but it was the only means I had been able
to think of which would get me into the place without a card. If Yusuf had collected the stuff earlier in the evening I should find myself in the soup within a couple of minutes but I counted it almost a certainty that they would do their work late at night and by making my call at 8.30 I was hoping that I had forestalled him. It was an anxious moment as I watched Gamal covertly to see his reaction to my story.

He frowned but to my relief said, after a moment, ‘So the young fool's taken a spot too much again, eh?'

‘No, no, Mr. Gamal!' I hastened to protest. ‘Believe me, poor Yusuf is really ill. He ate bad fish, I think; anyhow it is some sort of poisoning. He was sick and weak as a dog when he sent for me this evening and begged me to report to you and offer my services in place of his own for a job that he had to do.'

‘What sort of a job?' Gamal enquired.

I shrugged and spread out my hands in a truly Oriental gesture. ‘Mr. Gamal, he told me nothing; only that you relied on him and that if you were willing to let me take his place I could earn some good money.'

‘I bet you've got a pretty shrewd idea what Yusuf does, or he wouldn't have sent you,' said Gamal quickly.

‘Well, Mr. Gamal,' I fluttered my eyelashes coyly and smiled at my feet. ‘Yusuf knows I'm to be trusted. And although he's never let on to me, I've got my own ideas how he earns his cash.'

‘You've guessed anyhow that for a few hours every couple of weeks he risks seeing the inside of a prison?'

‘Nobody ever gets paid good money for doing nothing,' I said sententiously. ‘We've all got to live, haven't we?'

‘That's true enough,' Gamal nodded. ‘And you're the sort of boy who's prepared to risk a spell on those lines yourself, eh?'

‘Yusuf didn't say so but I'm sure that's why he picked me. I'm game to do anything you wish, Mr. Gamal—if the pay's right.'

He stared at me very hard for a moment with his little, black, beady eyes, evidently wondering whether he could trust me, but my story was plausible enough and, in view of Oonas' carefully-arranged roster of collectors, he probably had no one else to hand that he could send in Yusuf's place. Without saying
anything further he stood up and went out of the room.

I was beginning to get a little anxious as it suddenly occurred to me that he might be telephoning somewhere to check up my story and if he did I should be sunk. I slipped my hand behind my hip and loosened my gun so that it would draw easily, knowing that if Gamal
was
checking up my only hope of getting out of the place alive would be by acting before he could.