‘Gareth,’ he said, ‘do you read the newspapers?’
‘Of course I read the papers. Damn it, it’s my job. Part of it,’ he amended.
One of the incidental duties of the Head of Cairo’s Secret Police, the Mamur Zapt, was to read the day’s press. Actually, he read it twice; before publication, to stop undesirable items from getting in, and after publication, to realize, resignedly, that they had.
‘The financial pages?’
‘Well, no.’
They consisted, so far as he could see, entirely of numbers; and on the whole numbers were not considered politically inflammatory.
‘You should.’
‘Cotton prices, contango, that sort of thing? No, thanks.’
‘Take cotton prices, for instance. Nothing interesting about them?’
‘Absolutely nothing,’ said Owen firmly.
‘You have not noticed that they are only half what they were a year ago?’
‘No.’
Cotton was Agriculture’s concern.
‘A half, you say? That’s rather a fall.’
‘It is. And since Egypt depends on cotton, it’s reduced the whole national income. By fifteen per cent.’
‘Hmm. Well, that does seem a lot. But manageable, manageable.’
‘That’s what your bank manager’s doing. Managing it.’
‘Yes, but–’
‘It affects the government finances too, of course. In a big way.’
‘Fifteen per cent?’
‘More.’
‘Well, that is a bit tough. It explains what they’ve been doing to my budget. I thought they were just being bloody-minded as usual.’
‘A thing like this,’ said his companion, who was aide to the Consul-General, ‘gives the bloody-minded their chance. The Old Man’s hospitality allowance has been cut by half. Half! How I’m going to manage that, I don’t know. All these damned visitors! They all expect a free drink, and they measure it in bottles, not glasses.’
‘Another one?’
Owen stood up and picked up Paul’s glass. Paul glanced at his watch.
‘A little one, please. I’ve got a meeting at three.’
Owen stopped, astonished.
‘At three?’
The siesta hour, or two, or three, was normally inviolate.
‘Yes. It’s to do, actually, with the financial pages. Perhaps you should come along.’
‘No, thanks. No-o, thanks.’
On the outside wall of the Governorate was a stout wooden box in which from time immemorial the humble folk of Cairo had deposited petitions, denunciations and information which they wished to bring to the attention of the Mamur Zapt.
The Mamur Zapt was no longer the powerful right-hand man of the Sultan he had been in the seventeenth century – indeed, there was no longer a Sultan – but lots of people did not know that and still insisted on writing to him.
They wrote to him about all sorts of things: the price of bread (risen a lot recently); which of the traders was giving short measure (all, but some more than others); the sexual habits of figures prominent in the city (entertaining and quite possibly accurate).
In among the grimy scraps of paper there were often brief, scribbled messages which were of great use to him in his secret service work.
These were the items to which he turned first: but the items he turned to second were the petitions, of which there were usually quite a lot. Many ordinary Cairenes, completely flummoxed by the Egyptian bureaucracy, which was of an Ottoman labyrinthineness, preferred to make use of the more personal mode of address which the Mamur Zapt’s box represented.
Owen insisted on handling all petitions himself. Often there was little he could do but he always made sure that, so far as they could be, issues raised were followed up. This was very popular with the ordinary folk of Cairo but less so with the bureaucracy, as Nikos, his Official Clerk, pointed out.
It was one of Nikos’s duties to empty the box every day and lay its contents on Owen’s desk. He did not like doing this as it meant going out of his office. He preferred to keep his distance from the hoi polloi.
That went for the contents of the box, too, which he was quite happy to leave to Owen to deal with. Occasionally, though, Owen needed his help; as this morning.
‘Read this. I can’t make head nor tail of it. If it’s a dowry, I don’t want anything to do with it.’
‘It’s not a dowry,’ said Nikos. ‘It’s a waqf.’
A waqf was, Owen knew, a religious bequest or endowment. And that was nearly all he knew about it, except that the waqf fell under Islamic law (and was therefore nothing to do with him) and was extremely complicated.
‘I still don’t want anything to do with it.’
Waqfs were quite common. They were a traditional legal arrangement for the giving of alms. A waqf was an assignment in perpetuity of the income from a piece of property for charitable purposes, the upkeep of houses for the poor, for example, or the maintenance of mosques or hospitals or schools.
It could also, however, be used for the benefit of the founder’s family. The founder could provide for a salary to be paid to a member of his family to act as administrator or stipulate that surplus income be given to his descendants as long as they survived.
Such a system was, of course, open to abuse and over the centuries most possibilities for abuse had been thoroughly explored. From very early days it had been necessary to regulate the system and now, such was the number and scale of waqfs, that task was undertaken by an entire Ministry, the Ministry for Religious Endowments.
‘Not for me,’ said Owen firmly.
‘I will tell you about it,’ said Nikos, disregarding him.
‘It’s from a woman, whose husband benefited for many years from a waqf. He was a schoolteacher and ran a kuttub for small children. It had been in his family for generations. Anyway, he died and she expected the benefit to pass to their son. It didn’t.’
‘I thought these things went on forever?’
‘So did she. Apparently, though, someone invoked a clause she’d never heard of whereby on the death of her husband the benefit passed to a distant male relative. The relative turned out to be senile and was, she says, tricked into selling the benefit to a rich man who now wants to kick her out.’
‘I don’t think I can handle this. I’ll put her on to somebody in the Ministry.’
‘She’s already tried them.’
‘Well – all right, give me the letter. I’ll think about it.’
‘There’s just one other thing. She says several other people in the neighbourhood have recently lost their benefits in a similar way.’
‘The same man?’
‘She doesn’t say.’ Nikos handed back the letter. ‘It would be easy to find out. A walk round the neighbourhood. But, then, that’s something you like doing, isn’t it?’
The phone rang. It was Paul.
‘Gareth, the Old Man would like you to take a look at something.’
‘Yes?’
‘A man died in one of the offices