Free The Girl in the Nile by Michael Pearce Page A

up? Not from the salon, was it?”
    “No. I had picked her up first, before going to the salon. She was waiting for me.”
    “And waiting for you where?”
    “I was to pick her up by the Souk Al-Gadira.”
    “
By
the Souk Al-Gadira? Did you not pick her up from a house?”
    “No, effendi”—the chauffeur was being polite now—“the souk there is where four roads meet. The streets are narrow and twist and turn and it is not advisable to take a car up them. Not a car like this one.”
    There was a note of reverence in the chauffeur’s voice. All the time he talked he kept his hand on the bonnet, partly for reassurance—he was less confident than he seemed—and partly as a caress.
    “So where did you meet?”
    “At the junction of the Sharia el Garb with the Sharia el Hakim. I was told she would be waiting for me.”
    “Who told you?”
    The chauffeur looked very unhappy.
    “Effendi,” he whispered, “I—I do not think I should say.”
    The Prince, then.
    “Had you been to the spot before?”
    Eventually they brought him to admit that he had either collected the girl from or returned the girl to the spot on several occasions over the last two months.
    “And did you ever go with the girl to her house? Think before you speak.”
    Never. The chauffeur swore on the Book. He had always delivered her to the same spot. Always. He had stayed in the car. She had never asked him to accompany her home. He would have been reluctant to accede if she had. Who knew what might befall the car if left unattended? “Effendi,” said the chauffeur earnestly, “there are bad men abroad.” Worst; there were small boys. It was clear that, for the chauffeur at least, cars had priority over women.
    The chauffeur, then, had no idea where the girl lived? He had not. He was prepared to swear it on the Book.
    Nevertheless, Owen thought he might be speaking the truth.
    Mahmoud tried one last way. Had the chauffeur ever picked up the Prince from the neighborhood? Or delivered him to a house in that vicinity? He stopped the chauffeur wearily before he got to the Book.
     
    Owen went down to the souk himself. The man he was looking for, a Greek, was sitting at a table outside a café, deep in conversation with three Arabs. From time to time, almost absentmindedly, he reached into his pocket and produced a sweet, which he gave to any small boy who happened to be near. There were, naturally, quite a lot of small boys near.
    The Greek was deep in a dramatic tale of misadventure.
    “And then, by God, it pulled out to miss a donkey and I looked, lo, and it was coming straight towards me! I threw myself against the wall and prayed. And God must have heard my prayers, for it passed by me leaving me unharmed.”
    “God is great!” said the rapt audience.
    “Unharmed,” said the Greek, “but not untouched. For as it passed, it reached out and caught my sleeve and rent it. And I stumbled and would have fallen had it not been for the wall.”
    “God is indeed merciful!”
    “He is indeed!” agreed the Greek.
    “Such things ought not to be,” said one of his hearers. “That is true. And do you know what I believe to be at the root of the problem?”
    His listeners shook their heads.
    “Speed,” declared the Greek. “That’s what it is. People are trying to go too fast.”
    “True. Oh, very true.”
    “It is the curse of the age.”
    “What is wrong with donkeys?” asked one of the men. “That’s what I say. God put man in the world. He put donkeys in the world. But he did not put cars!”
    “That is true,” said his hearers, impressed. They volunteered their own embroiderings of the theme.
    The Greek could not, however, put the incident out of his mind.
    “It was a mighty car,” he said, “and painted green.”
    “Green?” said one of the small boys, all of whom had been following the conversation as closely as the men.
    “Yes. And that is not right, either. For green is the color of the Prophet and—”
    The small boy,