Free The Girl in the Nile by Michael Pearce Page B

however, was not interested.
    “I have seen a green car,” he said. “It comes down here.”
    “What sort of car?”
    The boy described it.
    “The very car!” declared the Greek. He slipped the boy two large boiled sweets and turned to his friends across the table.
    “Be warned!” he said. “Lest you, too, be crushed and defiled! Guard your footsteps! Look over your shoulder!” Etcetera, etcetera. His hearers enjoyed every minute of it. Cairenes liked a good alarm.
    The Greek, satisfied with the effect of his story, rose from his seat, shook hands all round and prepared to depart. At the last moment he caught sight of Owen, who had taken up position at an adjoining table, and raised hands to heaven. “My friend!” he declared. “And I had not seen you!” Owen rose to greet him and they embraced like long-lost brothers. The Greek was persuaded—needed no persuasion, really—to sit down. More coffee was called for. The Greek’s friends at his previous table watched benignly; and the phalanx of small boys switched support.
    The Greek continued to feed them with sweets. And then, after he and Owen had been talking for some while, he crooked his finger and called over the boy who had seen the car.
    “My friend has in interest in our car,” he said. The small boy swelled with the pride of implied shared possession.
    “It is a good car,” he said.
    “Sadly, though—and this is the way of the world as you will find out when you grow up—my friend is less interested in the car itself than in some of the people it carries. One in particular.” He winked at the boy. “Did not the car, when it stopped here, pick up a fine young woman?”
    “I don’t know about fine,” said the boy. “It picked up Leila.”
    “There!” said the Greek to Owen. “I knew it! And he even knows her name!”
    “Leila Sekhmet,” said the boy.
    “And she lives near here?”
    “Just up the street.”
    “Show me the house,” said the Greek, “and if it should happen that on the way we meet a sweet-seller…”
    It did so happen. The Greek purchased a bag of sweets, well, not so much a bag as a twist of newspaper, distributed some of the sweets among his retinue of small boys and gave the rest to his guide.
    “It may be that future conversation could benefit us both,” he said.
    The boy led them up one of the dark streets to a place where the houses were tall and thin and so closely packed together that door followed immediately upon door. He stopped outside one of these.
    “Leila lives here?”
    “Yes.”
    “Who does the house belong to?”
    “Mrs. Rabaq.”
    “And who is Mrs. Rabaq?”
    “Leila’s aunt.”
    The Greek knocked on the door. After some moments it was opened by an elderly woman servant.
    “Please announce me to Mrs. Rabaq,” said the Greek. “Tell her we come about Leila.”
    The woman stood still.
    “Who are you?” she said.
    “This is the Mamur Zapt,” said the Greek, indicating Owen.
    The woman’s eyes swept over him.
    “I shall not tell her that,” she said.
    She stumped away. They heard her steps going up the stairs. It was a while before they returned.
    “She will see you.” The woman hesitated. “She is very old,” she said, “and no longer understands things clearly. But she will see you.”
    The room was closely shuttered and very dark. The only light was from a dim kerosene lamp standing on a low table. There was a sofa in the middle of the room on which an old woman was sitting. She had pulled her veil right over her face so that they could not even see her eyes.
    “Leila is my niece,” she said. “What has happened to her?”
    She had spoken in Arabic and Owen replied in Arabic. He fell naturally into the courteous, familiar mode used to address the elderly.
    “We do not know that anything has happened to her, mother,” he said. “But we fear.”
    “I fear too,” said the woman. “I always fear.”
    “We fear that an accident may have befallen her.”
    The woman drew