Free Donkey-Vous by Michael Pearce Page A

this poor quarter were made of mud. Every year when the heavy rain came it washed away some of the mud and left the houses slightly shapeless, their corners blurred. Then the sun came and dried the mud until it cracked. Little by little it would crumble and then be washed away when the rain came again. Many of the houses were little better than ruins.
    The suffragi went into one of the most ruined of these. There was not even a proper door, just a gap in the wall.
    The trackers waited at a discreet distance. Georgiades and Owen came up with them. Georgiades looked at Owen and made a face.
    “Nothing else for it!” Owen said resignedly. He waved the trackers in.
    They were holding the suffragi when Owen stepped into the room. The suffragi was putting up no resistance; indeed, there was a smile on his face.
    Owen went across to the case and snapped it open.
    It was empty.
     
    “It was a decoy,” said Owen bitterly, “just a decoy.”
    “And you fell for it,” said Garvin, with a certain grim satisfaction.
    “You’ve got the man, though,” said McPhee, loyal to the last.
    “Yes, but I can’t hold him. What’s he done?”
    “He has deceived us,” said McPhee stiffly.
    “The way you’re conducting this investigation, that’ll be true of half the population by the time you’ve finished,” said Garvin.
    “Anyway, that doesn’t constitute a crime.”
    “Stolen a case.”
    “He’s not stolen a case,” said Owen. “It’s his case.”
    “Not Berthelot’s?”
    “No. Like Berthelot’s. Exactly like.”
    “What absolute nonsense! What is a suffragi doing with a case like that?”
    “He says he uses it to take his supper to the club. Anton won’t give him any food, so he has to take his own. He used to take it wrapped in a newspaper but Anton didn’t like that. He said it lowered the tone. So now he takes it in a posh case.”
    “Just like Berthelot’s?”
    “Just like Berthelot’s. Pure coincidence.”
    “Coincidence!” McPhee fumed.
    “And meanwhile the real case went somewhere else, I suppose,” said Garvin.
    “No. It’s still in the cloakroom, where Berthelot left it. The attendant says he can’t give it to us unless we produce a receipt.”
    “Oh really!”
    Garvin laughed. “I take it the money is no longer in it?” he said.
    “There never was any money in it. According to Berthelot.”
    “Just a case, which he properly left in the cloakroom?”
    “And the cloakroom has properly looked after it.”
    “Well,” said Garvin, “they’re certainly running rings around you.”
    “They’re just laughing at us,” said Owen. “Everyone’s laughing at us. The donkey-boys are laughing, the bazaar’s laughing, even you’re laughing.”
    “I’m not laughing,” said Garvin, “not any more. The French—”
    “Ah yes,” said Owen uncomfortably.
    “—are not laughing either. They’re hopping mad. They say it’s all our fault. If we’d not messed things up the exchange would have gone ahead as planned and Moulin would now be a free man.”
    “It’s hardly fair—”
    “Isn’t it?” Garvin cut in. “You were at Anton’s, weren’t you? Well…”
    He tossed a piece of paper on the table in front of them. Owen read:
    Because you’ve broken your side of the agreement and told the Mamur Zapt, we are breaking our side of the agreement.”
    “When they got to the address Berthelot was given,” said Garvin, “they found the house empty. There was just this note left on a table.”
    “No Moulin?”
    “No Moulin,” said Garvin.
     
    Owen poured out his troubles to Mahmoud, who listened sympathetically and then took him out for a coffee to restore him. They chose a café in one of the small streets opposite Shepheard’s: the Wagh el Birket, in fact. It was just after midday, however, and the ladies of the night were still sleeping off the effects of their labors. The shuttered doors on the balconies were closed, the cheap bands in the arcade opposite stilled. Only a few of