Absolution

by Paul E. Hardisty

  The garden afforded me complete cover. I watched the factory for a while, and seeing no one, and no evidence of cameras, I set to work on the fence. Using the wire cutters on the multi-tool I always carry in my purse, I cut a flap in the fence, wrapped my scarf closer around my nose and mouth and was soon inside, moving quickly between the two ponds.

  I had no idea what I might find.

  I gained the rear wall of the main building and followed it along to a loading area of some kind. Crates were stacked along the wall, four, five high in some places. I clambered up and pried open the wooden lid of one of the crates with my multi-tool. It was too dark to see what was inside, but I did not want to use my torch. I reached in. My fingers brushed rough-cut wooden slats, then slippery metal. Ingots, ranked side-by side, a dozen perhaps on this layer. I pushed my thumbnail into the metal, felt it sink in. Lead.

  I replaced the lid, slid to the ground. I continued along the wall until I found a doorway. It was unlocked. I pushed it open, looked inside. A blast of hot air nearly pushed me over. It was a stairwell, dimly lit. I went inside. My heart was beating so hard that I could barely hear my own footsteps. I climbed two flights, three. Another doorway, again unlocked. I pushed it open. A piercing yellow light blinded me, and for a moment I stood there, immobilised. As my vision returned I looked out across a broad factory floor. I saw first the big crucibles, giant ladles pouring bright orange streams of molten metal into hissing ingots. And then the creaking conveyers, the towering belching furnaces tended by dark, helmeted servants, the whites of their eyes staring out from blackened, industrial faces.

  I scanned the elevated walkway left and right. It appeared to be empty. I stepped out onto the grated platform and started moving towards what appeared to be the quenching area. Clouds of steam billowed among vessels and pipework. For a moment I was engulfed. I kept walking. When I emerged, I found myself standing face to face with a uniformed worker. I do not know who was more surprised.

  We stood a moment looking at each other, he soot-faced, stubble-jawed, with a fall of greying hair pushing from under his ill-fitting hard hat; me encased in my burqa, only my eyes showing, sexual dimorphism at its most extreme.

  I turned and ran. I was already out the back door and across the open ground between the pits and to the back fence by the time he opened the door. I found the flap in the wire and was back inside the garden when a second man appeared in the doorway. Alarm bells were ringing now and I could hear dogs barking in the distance. The second man switched on a torch, swung the beam across the silvery surface of the pits. I crouched low, watched as more men arrived, guards with dogs on leashes, some brandishing weapons. They were coming towards me.

  I fled across the perimeter road and into the warren of run-down apartment blocks and crumbling houses that abutted the industrial district – the dwellings of workers and their families. I moved quickly, keeping to the darkness whenever I could, heading east, back towards the centre of Cairo. My heart was pounding. Inside the burqa I was covered in sweat. Police sirens blared in the distance. I kept going.

  After a while the sounds of the chase subsided. In the darkened recess of an old foyer, I peeled off my burqa and threw it into a rubbish container. An hour later I was stepping out of a taxi, back at my apartment in Ma’adi.

  It had seemed the most ordinary of industrial operations, indistinguishable from the others in the area and like so many I have seen over my career. A lead smelter. Why had Al-Gambal directed me there?

  This morning I telephoned the number on the back of the card. The conversation went something like this:

  Isis be blessed.

  Ezeykh’a. (My Egyptian slang: ‘hello’.)

  And to you, good lady.

  May I speak to Mehmet, please?

  You are, good lady.

  Yusuf Al-Gambal gave me your number.

  I see. (Silence.)

  He said you might be able to help me.

  If your soul is willing and pure, I can.

  I do not know about the latter. (I cannot believe I said this.)

  Lady.

  Please.

  It is the work of Set.

  Pardon me?

  Set. The fallen one, the god of nothingness, the one who murdered his brother.

  Please. What can you tell me about Yusuf’s trial? What was he accused of?

  He was accused of telling the truth.

  Pardon me?

  The Ma’at has long since departed from the Two Kingdoms. Corruption rules here now.

  I am sorry, I do not understand. What is the Ma’at?

  The Ma’at, good lady, is truth, justice, order. It is that which is right.

  What was the truth he told?

  Osiris walks the Earth! (He shouted so loud I had to move the phone away from my ear). Many know this. But Yusuf had the courage to speak of it openly. This was his crime. Good lady, the children of Isis are being sacrificed to ugliness, cruelty and greed.

  I am sorry. Mehmet, I do not understand.

  Please, call me Amenhotep.

  Amenhotep, then. (I was shaking my head by this stage. Had Yusuf played a nice little trick on me, sending me traipsing around nondescript industrial sites, putting me in touch with a Kemetist quack?) Why would Yusuf send me to a smelter in the Hadayek-el Koba district?

  The Two Kingdoms are being destroyed, good lady.

  Please, call me Veronique.

  Of course, thank you, Madame Veronique. As I said, the ancient birthplaces of the greatest civilisation the world has ever known are being laid waste.

  By whom?

  By the consortium.

  What is that? Is it an organisation? A company? Is it connected to the smelter? I do not understand.

  I cannot tell you more. Not now.

  Can we meet?

  You must understand, Madame Veronique, that you must be very careful. Call me in two days. From a different phone.

  And that was it. He hung up.

  * 11 *

  Incentive

  They double-anchored Flame in a low-tide tributary of the main estuary where the mangroves grew thick along both banks, shielding the boat from view. Clay left the MP5 and its spare magazines in the priest hole, along with a dozen Krugerrands. Everything else – his passports, the money, the rest of the gold, extra ammunition for the G21 – he took. As they rowed away he thought that she looked very small, very lonely here, this vessel that had carried him safely over so many miles.

  They left the dinghy hidden among the mangroves and walked inland. An hour and a half later they reached the coast road and hitched a ride north in the back of a farmer’s truck. The outskirts of Mombasa loomed and then thickened, red laterite and corrugated iron replacing grassland and scrub acacia. They continued by taxi into the centre of town. Crowbar paid the driver and they started into the market-day chaos of old Mombasa.

  ‘Who is this friend of yours who can get us a plane?’ said Clay, pushing past a donkey cart piled with freshly dug cassava.

  ‘Rhodesian,’ said Crowbar. ‘Does contract work for me occasionally. Logistics is his thing. He’s no fighter, but if it exists in Africa, he can find it.’

  ‘You trust him?’

  ‘I’ve known G a long time. He was a quartermaster in the Rhodesian Army. He used to help me out sometimes, back then.’

  ‘I asked if you trusted him, oom.’

  ‘I trust him to get a plane for us. Beyond that, no.’

  Walking the streets of another African port city, Cairo seemed as far away as it was. Clay wondered what had driven Rania to Egypt, if she was safe. Nine months ago he’d asked for her help, and she’d given it. Now she was asking for his.

  ‘I need to call her, Koevoet.’

  ‘Be quick.’

  They found a telephone kiosk off the main street. Crowbar took one booth, Clay the other. He dialled the number Hope had given Crowbar. The line clicked, gurgled, rang. No answer. He tried again.

  ‘Ready?’ said Crowbar, tapping him on the
shoulder.

  Clay shook his head. ‘I’ll try a few more times.’

  ‘I’ll be at the bar. Turn right, about a hundred metres. The Violet.’

  Clay nodded, put down the phone, watched Crowbar disappear into the street. Kenya was in the same time zone as Egypt. Just gone four in the afternoon. He imagined her there, gliding over the pavement in some traffic-filled street, everything about her veiled and inscrutable, and despite everything they’d shared and lost, he realised that he’d never really known her, and probably never would.

  He reached for the receiver, started dialling the number. Halfway through he stopped, killed the line. What was he doing? The Broederbond, the AB, was set on killing him. Manheim was close. Clay could feel him. Assuming they could get to Cairo, how long until the AB tracked them down? It would only compound Rania’s problems. No. He needed to stay away.

  He tried her number again, with the same result, a hollow ring echoing through an empty room somewhere in Cairo, with no one to hear it.

  He trudged out of the kiosk, turned right, pushed his way through the crowds towards the port. The Indian Ocean shed blades of ultraviolet light that hurt his eyes. Sweat ran from his temples, guttered in the hollow of his solar plexus. The last time he’d seen her, back in Cyprus almost two years ago, she’d been in intensive care, holding on to life – hers and their unborn daughter’s – by the faintest echo. Since then, he’d travelled the world without her, an outcast, unable to understand what had made her do the things she’d done, lost within the raging gales of his own regret. They were all so close to him now, these people, these dark eyes and darker faces, jostling him, calling out to him in languages he could not understand. And then he realised. They were all dead.

  Clay closed his eyes. Unburied corpses stiffen and bloat quickly in the tropic sun. Decomposition begins, and the carrion eaters do fast work. Vultures are often the first to appear. Then the hyenas come, and the jackals. During the war, he’d seen the dead stripped of flesh and bones crushed to powder within hours, and he’d seen the yet-living plummet through the atmosphere towards a seemingly endless sea. And he knew, now, that if he willed it so, he could open his eyes and see them as they were: living, breathing, whole. It was progress, of sorts, this ability to recover.

  Clay swayed, cycled oxygen through his lungs, forced the air into the deepest part of himself. He narrowed his eyes, kept going.

  Crowbar was in the Violet, seated at a back table with a flaxen-haired, sunburnt white man and two glistening black whores.

  ‘Any luck?’ Crowbar said as Clay approached.

  Clay shook his head and sat.

  ‘You look like kak,’ said Crowbar.

  ‘Dankie.’

  Crowbar pushed a glass of beer across the table towards Clay. ‘This miscreant is G,’ he said. ‘And his friends.’

  Clay nodded to the man, then to the whores.

  ‘Welcome to Kenya,’ said G. He was pale. Sweat covered his face. He looked as if he was fighting a bout of malaria.

  The women smiled at him, big lipstick and blue eyeshadow, the stains of some cheap skin whitener.

  ‘We’re all set,’ said Crowbar. ‘Leave tomorrow.’

  G said something in Arabic and one of the whores got up and went to the bar. G drained his beer. ‘Where you okes headed?’

  ‘South,’ said Clay.

  The whore returned with a beer, placed it on the table, sat back down.

  G wiped his forehead with a greying handkerchief, lanced a cigarette between his lips. ‘Catch me a glow, would ya?’

  Crowbar pulled out his lighter and set the flame to the tip of G’s smoke.

  G leaned back and took a long pull on the cigarette. ‘South, eh?’ he said, exhaling towards the ceiling. ‘I’m surprised.’

  ‘I’m happy for you,’ said Clay.

  G drank. ‘You okes in a bit of trouble?’

  ‘And howzit with you, broer?’ said Crowbar. ‘Not too good, I hear.’

  G put his arm around the whore on his left. His hand hovered over one of her substantial breasts. ‘I make do.’

  ‘Of course you do.’ Crowbar stood. ‘Tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’ said G.

  Crowbar stared down at him.

  ‘The kite, china. The money.’

  ‘Tomorrow.’ Crowbar turned and walked away.

  ‘You the main manne what counts, Koevoet,’ G shouted after him.

  Clay stayed seated, finished his beer. ‘Thanks, broer.’

  G raised his half-empty glass. ‘Check you, china.’

  Clay followed Crowbar out onto the street.

  ‘Friend?’ said Clay, catching up to Crowbar.

  ‘Like I said.’

  ‘“Check you, china”?’

  Crowbar smiled. ‘Rhoddie slang: “See you, friend.”’

  Clay nodded. ‘What’s the bet he’s on the phone to Manheim right now?’

  ‘Vyftig-vyftig.’

  ‘Good odds.’

  ‘I’ve given him a little incentive.’

  ‘Down payment?’

  ‘If the bastard screws us, I’ll kill him.’

  They walked back to the kiosk. While Crowbar waited outside, Clay tried Rania again. This time, she answered first ring.

  ‘Hello beautiful.’ He couldn’t help it. She was.

  ‘Mon Dieu. C’est toi.’ She sounded as if she’d just run up three flights of stairs.

  ‘I got your message. I can’t come.’

  The line hissed.

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  ‘I need you.’

  ‘They tried to kill me, Ra. I can’t lead them to you.’

  ‘I am all alone.’ She was crying now, but trying to hide it. ‘The police are watching me.’

  Clay cut his breath short. ‘I don’t want to make it worse.’

  ‘Mon Dieu, mais ce n’est pas vrai,’ she said, anger replacing tears. ‘My husband and son are dead. I am being accused of murder. How could it be worse?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Ra, for what happened to them.’

  He could hear her breathing, trying to steady herself.

  ‘Chéri, if you love me, you will come to me now.’ She paused. He started to answer but she cut him off before he could get past the intake of breath. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘Don’t say it. I know you think that you cannot love. I have never believed that.’

  ‘That isn’t the point, Ra. It’s not about that, and you know it.’

  ‘Why does the idea frighten you so? Do you think it a weakness, a frailty?’

  ‘I don’t know what it is.’ He’d tried to explain this to her before, in Istanbul.

  She sighed.

  He could feel the frustration rising, his inability to express himself in a way that she would understand. ‘It changes nothing.’

  ‘Stupid man. It changes everything.’

  Clay said nothing, let the line burn between them. And he knew she was right – about the forces that had kept them apart; about the need to act for positives rather than against negatives; about everything.

  ‘Come to me, chéri.’ Tears drowned her words. ‘Please. I am afraid.’

  Clay took the receiver away from his ear, pushed it down hard against the tabletop, stared at the veins in the back of his hand, the calloused welts of his knuckles. It was as if she was reconfiguring his DNA using nothing but her voice.

  He lifted the receiver to his ear. ‘How can I find you?’

  ‘How long will it take you?’ Her voice brightening.

  ‘I’m not sure. A few days.’

  The sound of commotion in the background, scraping, a door closing in the distance. Then a pause, a long one. ‘Wait a moment,’ she said, stress in her voice.

  ‘What is it, Ra?’

  ‘Mon Dieu,’ she gasped. ‘Someone is coming.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘I don’t have time to explain. Call me when you get here.’ She read out a string of numbers. ‘Ask for Veronique.’
r />   ‘Be careful, Ra. Please.’

  ‘Yes, mon amour. You also.’

  Her words pulsed inside him. ‘Where will you be?’ he started to ask.

  But before he could finish, she was gone.

  * 12 *

  All the Rest of His Life

  They left the taxi five kilometres from the airstrip and walked in under a vault of stars. By the time they reached the strip, the sky was ash above them.

  They crouched among the sickle wood and cassia and watched the sky lighten. From their position, they could see the whole of the runway and back along the cut road that led to the red-dirt clearing that served as the apron. Two aircraft – single-engine high-winged Cessnas – stood next to a small corrugated-steel shack, a fuel bowser nearby. A ragged windsock hung limp from its post at the far side of the strip.

  ‘There it is,’ said Crowbar. ‘The larger of the two. Cessna 172. Cruises at about one hundred and ten knots. Range about nine hundred nautical miles.’ He handed Clay a pair of binoculars. ‘Glass the perimeter, ja.’

  Clay tracked the tree line, looking for anything that might signal that they were being watched. He shivered despite the heat. She was being hunted. He could still hear the terror in her voice. Two thousand, five hundred miles separated them. That meant at least three refuelling stops on the way, four to be safe. Assuming twelve hours of flying a day, they could be in Cairo in three and a half days. But this was Africa. He doubled it, immediately crushed the calculation. All you could do was take each mile as it came, each day. Anything else was a prescription for failure, for pain.

  Crowbar pulled out a handgun, checked the magazine, pulled back the slide. He looked at Clay. ‘Jericho 941, up-chambered to forty-five cal, ja. We get a lot of our stuff from the Israelis these days.’ Crowbar had spent almost a decade sourcing weapons and equipment for the SADF during the late eighties and nineties, when apartheid South Africa was under economic sanction. Back then, Israel had been a key supplier – indirectly, of course. ‘Anything?’ he asked.