Absolution

by Paul E. Hardisty

  ‘I cannot ask this of you, Mahmoud.’

  Mahmoud touched Clay on the shoulder. ‘Please, my friend. Allah asks this of me. He has put you in my path, and now it is my duty.’

  Clay pointed to his bandage. ‘You know what this was from, yes?’

  Mahmoud nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is not your duty to put yourself in danger.’

  The big truck driver turned in his seat and stared at him a long time, the wheel wedged stable against his hip. ‘Duty is not changing with risk,’ he said.

  ‘My best friend was a…’ Clay stumbled, stopped, unable to find the Arabic word. He pointed to his head. ‘One who thinks.’

  ‘Filsw’uf,’ said Mahmoud, smiling. Philosopher.

  Clay repeated the word. ‘This is not the time for being a philosopher.’

  Mahmoud faced the road. ‘Your friend is a good man, yes?’

  ‘Was.’

  ‘I am sorry.’

  ‘No need. Yes, he was good.’ Clay realised it had been a while since he’d thought of Eben. ‘It was philosophy killed him, Mahmoud. Philosophy and me.’

  ‘You cannot claim this power, my friend.’ Mahmoud pointed skywards. ‘Only Allah.’

  ‘The woman who is in danger, in Cairo. She tells me this also.’

  ‘She is very wise.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She is Muslim?’

  Clay nodded. ‘Very.’

  Mahmoud smiled, shifted gears, pushed the truck faster. ‘Then it is clear what must be done, and why.’

  They drove on in silence for a long time, through Al Kajuj and then Edfu, the sun moving through the sky above them, the rare shadows of road signs and distant mesas lengthening, the heat shimmering like sky on the road ahead, always out of reach. Mahmoud did not ask how he had come to emerge from the desert, alone and cut by bullets. He did not ask the nature of his friend’s danger in Cairo, nor of the reasons for Clay’s fear of the police. He sat behind the wheel of his truck and hummed verses from the Koran, swigging his cheap local booze, and drove towards whatever destiny Allah had ordained for him.

  By the time they reached Luxor, the first planets had appeared in the blush over the Nile – Venus cool and bright, Mars low in the sky, their positions not much changed since the time of the pharaohs. Mahmoud’s family home was set in the fertile west valley of the Nile, just outside town, a place of green fields, thickets of reed and palm, and clustered mud-brick buildings rendered in alabaster and shaded by cascades of bougainvillea and wreaths of oleander. Surely, green was the colour of paradise.

  Mahmoud parked the truck and turned off the engine. They sat a moment, staring ahead, silent, listening to the sounds of evening.

  ‘Come,’ Mahmoud said. ‘I will speak to my brother. Then we will take the car and start for Cairo. Your friend needs us.’

  They left for Cairo not long after, driving through the night.

  Mahmoud had given Clay a southern keffiyeh, which he wound around his head in the style of the Nubians. At the police checkpoint near the highway interchange at Asyut, they were waved on without stopping. A few hours later, at Minya, Clay feigned sleep as a policeman played the beam of a hand torch across the inside of the car. He heard Mahmoud exchange greetings with him. There was laughter, familiarity in their tone. They drove on.

  Three hours later, they were navigating through the early-morning haze of Cairo’s southern reaches, the traffic still quiet. Mahmoud pulled the car into a side street just off King Faisal Street in Giza and turned off the engine.

  Clay pulled his pack from the back seat and opened the door. ‘You are a good man,’ he said, reaching out his hand. He thought of offering money, but decided not to risk offending him.

  Mahmoud took his hand, squeezed hard and smiled. ‘Find your friend,’ he said. ‘Protect her now and always.’ Then he handed him a business card. ‘If you ever need anything, please call.’

  Clay smiled at the man’s words. ‘Inshallah.’

  ‘Whatever you must do, do in God’s name, my friend. You carry my fate with yours now.’

  ‘Please,’ said Clay. ‘I do not deserve such a responsibility.’

  Mahmoud pushed his chin to his chest. ‘Still, it is the truth.’

  Clay took a deep breath. ‘Live well. Mahmoud. I will do my best.’

  ‘God willing,’ said Mahmoud, ‘we must all.’ And then he was gone, swallowed up in the morning traffic. Another random meeting, plucked from the infinite and made real by fate or chance or determinism – who knew.

  It didn’t take Clay long to find the place. Number fourteen was a half-completed, half-decayed edifice of brick and cement and searching rebar covered over in a film of brown silt, wedged in like an afterthought between two larger, older structures. Here, the lanes between the buildings were narrow and steep, like the canyons of fraying wadis, choked with half-degraded plastic bags and discarded drink tins, torn through by speeding auto-rickshaws and lumbering, fenderless bakkies. He circled the place once, noted entrances and first-floor window alignments, scanned for rooftop joinings and overhangs, and then went in the front door.

  If the guy was home, he would not be expecting him. If he wasn’t, Clay would look around, settle himself in and wait, Crowbar style. If Rania was there, he’d do whatever he had to to get her out. Either way, he’d have the advantage. Hit first.

  The stairway was dark, stank of piss and vaguely of incense and cat. He took the stairs two at a time, moving quietly, counting off the flights. At the sixth floor he emerged into a dimly lit corridor. Same smells, but with something else there now, something familiar. He scanned the Arabic numerals on the wooden doors. Apartment ٦۱ was halfway along the corridor. Clay stopped, looked both ways, listened. The corridor was deserted. He reached out to knock on the door, but stopped, his knuckles inches from the wood. The door was ajar.

  Clay filled his lungs, steadied his pulse, reached for his Glock and pushed open the door.

  It was the smell hit him first. A swirling miasma of heat and decay. Memories came flooding back, rolled over him. He staggered, steadied himself, followed the lurking reek through the relic-strewn sitting room, past the filthy kitchen to the bedroom.

  The guy was lying on his back, his big hairy belly bulging towards the ceiling, his penis lying snaked in its den of wire. The full-length kaftan he was wearing was bunched up around his chest. His eyes were open; his mouth agape. Clay could see the guy’s big upper canines, the gold fillings in the molars. His chin sprouted a dark beard that had been waxed into a long, thin curve. The sheets beneath him were stained dark, arterial red. Clay counted three wounds in the guy’s fleshy neck, all in the left side.

  Clay stood a moment, his eyes still adjusting to the gloom. On the floor beside the bed, a lamp lay on its side, the shade dented and crushed. Bits of glass scattered the hardwood. He reached out, touched the body. It was cold. He turned over the man’s hands. Abrasions across his right knuckles and cuts across his left forearm where he’d tried to protect himself from a knife. Whoever he was, he’d fought back.

  Clay moved through the rest of the apartment, checking every door and cupboard. Except for the corpse, the place was empty. He went back to the sitting room. Near the door was an old mahogany table strewn with papers. Sheets of hand-drawn hieroglyphs, utility bills in Arabic addressed to Mehmet Al Sami. Was this the guy he’d spoken to from Aswan? Clay flipped through a stack of bills, found the phone company invoice and checked the number. It wasn’t the one Rania had given him. But this was the address. The invoice confirmed it. He must have another number. Perhaps another place, an office perhaps.

  On the phone, the guy had mentioned the Consortium. Had they got to him? Had they got her, too? Was it the AB? He shook his head, tried to push the thought away. He had to hope that this Mehmet had passed on his message, and that Rania would meet him tomorrow at the café.

  Clay took a last look around the flat, closed the door behind him and left the building through the back door, emerging in
to the noonday heat and stink of Cairo.

  Everything That Had Defined His Life

  Clay was halfway down the alley behind the building when he realised his mistake.

  No more than a few hours ago, someone had gone into the man’s apartment and murdered him. As far as he could tell, no one had yet discovered the body. But it was only a matter of time. Soon the police would be all over the place, looking for evidence. He’d touched the door handles, inside and out. If they dusted for fingerprints, they might be able to link him to the murder, even accuse him of it. Worse, if they found the note the dead guy had scribbled during their telephone conversation – where and when Rania should meet him, his decidedly Western alias – and if Rania had received his message, she could be going straight to them.

  This was no coincidence. None of it was. Clay knew that now. The world didn’t work that way – not with these things. But the causality behind it he could not see. One thing was sure: whatever Rania was mixed up in, whatever she was here trying to uncover, was worth killing for. Her husband and son were already dead, the police were after her for those murders. And now the one person she’d trusted enough for him to contact was dead.

  Clay stopped in the strip of shadow against the mud-brick wall and looked down the alley. To the east, the Giza market, busy now. To the west, an empty lot choked with smoking rubbish, boys playing football in the dust. Even dressed in Mahmoud’s Upper Egypt clothes, his beard now long and full but fair, he felt like a lighthouse beacon. He knew he needed to go back, and do it now, before the cops arrived – scour the flat for anything that he, or the police, could use to find Rania. He pulled the end of his turban down around his face, hunched low, leaned on his walking stick to disguise his height, kept his eyes and face directed groundwards, and started back towards the building.

  Clay pushed the steel door open and stepped into the gloom of the rear stairwell. He waited a moment, listened then started up the stairs. As he neared the sixth floor, that same smell smothered him, stronger now: blood and death and decomposition pushing through the background of shit and urine and yesterday’s dinner. He stood outside apartment sixty-one. The corridor was empty. He pushed open the door, stepped inside, closed the door behind him and bolted it closed.

  He stood a moment, scanning the room. The place looked more like a shrine than a place for living. Against one wall was a man-sized statue of Horus, its hawk head perched on the body of a chiselled athlete. All around were offerings, garlands of dead, browned flowers, burned-down candles, smaller sculptures of ancient Egyptian deities and demigods that Clay could neither recognise nor name. He continued through the flat, scanning the piles of books ranged up along the outside wall.

  A high-pitched scream cut the silence.

  It had come from outside, down in the street.

  Clay nudged the shutter lever with his stump, looked out through the louvres. Two boys were running away, down the lane. He took a deep breath, closed the shutters, continued his search.

  In the middle of the room: some pillows scattered over a carpet, a small, low table, a couple of rolled-up scrolls. More candleholders with charred wicks and cascading with rivulets of wax. And there, on the floor next to the one of the cushions, a glint of metal. It was small, about half the size of his small fingernail. He turned it over in his fingers. It was a button of some kind, a half-sphere of faux mother of pearl with a small hook on the back. A clutch of torn thread and a flap of cloth hung from the hook. It was a pretty thing, delicate, not something the big brute lying on the bed in the other room would wear. It had been ripped away from whatever it had adorned. Clay raised the button to his lips. The faintest odour came to him, a distant chemistry. Then it was gone.

  Clay pocketed the button and walked into the bedroom. The corpse lay as it had before, eyes open, arms splayed at its sides. The telephone was set on an old wooden dresser. Beside it was a journal of some sort, spiral bound, and nearby, a pencil, its wooden end crushed and marked with the imprints of teeth. Clay flicked through the pad, scanning the impenetrable Arabic scratchings, the scattered hieroglyphs, the cursive hieratic. He pushed the journal into the deep pocket of his robe. Then he moved to the bed and surveyed the knife wounds again. On the bed, half-hidden under a fold of the sheet, was a small pocket camera – one of the new digital models with a small screen on the back. Clay picked it up and turned it on. As the screen lit up, a picture came into view. He stood, silent, staring at the image.

  It was a woman. She was standing in the shower, naked. Her hands were under her breasts. Her hair flowed over her shoulders and across the pale skin of her chest in dark tresses. Her head was lowered, the face obscured. He scrolled back. Another photo: the same woman, turned away from the lens, her back and buttocks glistening and wet. Another photo, and another. The woman undressing, opening her brassiere, letting her breasts spill out, bending over to step out of her dress, undoing the shiny pearl-white buttons down the front, the tear and the missing second button clearly visible – the one in Clay’s pocket. Dozens of photographs. In many of them, the face was clear, and utterly, devastatingly recognisable. That stratospheric fusion of Berber and Breton. The date stamp glowed digital orange in the lower right corner. Yesterday.

  Clay exhaled long, steadied himself. It was Rania. Beautiful, powerful, delicate, tragic Rania. He turned off the camera and dropped it into his pocket, realisation thudding though his brain. He pushed through it, walked to the bathroom, searched the floor, the toilet, the shower stall. It didn’t take him long to find the opening, given the single perspective of all the photographs. One of the tiles had been replaced with a mirror-like panel, about the size of a postage stamp. Clay went back into the bedroom, opened the closet on the wall facing the bathroom. He pushed aside a rack of hanging clothes. The back panelling of the closet had been cut away and a layer of brick removed, creating a small, darkened space. A hole had been hurriedly hacked through the brick. Crumbled masonry and powdered mortar still covered the floor. A half-empty tube of lubricant lay shrivelled and leaking on a makeshift shelf cut into the wall. The air was dense with dust and the smell of musk and sweat. Clay recoiled, stepped back out into the dead man’s room, breathing hard. Jesus Christ. What the hell had she got herself mixed up in? And how had she come to trust this guy?

  That was as far into contemplation as he got.

  A loud bang burst through his wondering. Someone was hammering on the door. A male voice shouting in Arabic: ‘Open the door.’ And then: ‘Sort’ah.’ Police.

  Clay froze, held his breath.

  A pause, voices outside, some sort of conversation in Arabic. Then more hammering, the edge of a fist pounding the wood. The same voice, raised higher now: ‘Open the door. This is the police.’

  Clay moved towards the bedroom window and pulled aside the curtains. The wood casement was old, the varnish peeled and faded. He swung back the latch, pulled the window open, looked outside. The building’s outer wall was rendered cinderblock, with a six-storey fall to the alleyway. The flat, brick-strewn roof of the facing building was a couple of stories lower. There was no way to get across. It was too far to jump, even with a running start. Clay closed the window, wiped the latch with his sleeve.

  More hammering now, the voice telling the resident of flat sixty-one that this was his last warning. Clay moved into the hallway, turned left, away from the front door, and entered some kind of office. Stacks of books and papers covered every surface, tottered in dusty piles against the walls. In the middle of the room a large desk, with what appeared to be the carved stone legs of a lion, hulked under a mountain of journals. Clay moved toward the outside wall, pushed aside the heavy curtain and opened the window. Behind him, a crash, the splintering of wood as the doorframe gave way, the sound of footsteps heavy on the hardwood floor. Clay’s heart stilled. He breathed, looked outside. He was on the other side of the building now, around the corner from the bedroom. The outside wall here, at the back of the building, was unrendered, the brickwork bare,
the mortar weeping between the bricks in hardened cornices, in some places absent. Just to the right was some kind of utility conduit, a pair of vertical bricked-in columns about a metre square that ran from ground level to the roof. If he could make his way across, he could wedge himself in the channel between the uprights and chimney his way either down to the street, or up to the roof.

  The sound of footsteps now, the low murmur of voices. For the thousandth time since waking up in the hospital in Oman, he cursed his missing hand, then levered himself up and out.

  He waited, tucked behind a water tank. From where he crouched, he could see through the skirting of perforated brickwork down to the street. He watched as the crowds outside the building grew. At any moment he expected the police to emerge from the stairway onto the roof. They would surely have seen the open window, surmised that the killer had escaped that way.

  There was only one way out. There were no adjoining buildings and no rear stairs. The Glock was cradled in his lap, ready. He was prepared to fight if he had to. Soon, another police car arrived, and not long after, an ambulance. Time crept by, thick and viscous, tomorrow’s appointed meeting with Rania decades distant.

  He’d been on the roof just under half an hour when he saw the paramedics emerge onto the street carrying a stretcher. They loaded the body into the back of the ambulance, closed the rear door and stood chatting to a pair of cops. The crowd was packed in close, and as the ambulance moved away the people parted and reformed behind it like water in a river.

  Perhaps because of what the police saw, the condition of the body, or the time since death, which was obviously considerable, no one appeared on the roof. After a time, the last police car left. Slowly, the crowds on the street dispersed. Dusk came. The sun sank red into the edge of the city, lit the brume that smothered the buildings. After a while even the great pyramids were only faint rumours of evening.