By now, Tall had started to react. He was fumbling behind his back, going for his gun. There was no way to close the distance in time. Clay flung Moonface’s pistol at Tall’s face. Instinctively, the cop turned his head, closed his eyes. The gun hit the side of his skull, jerked his head back, skidded away across the garbage-strewn tarmac. Tall stumbled back, fell to the ground. As he did, his own gun clattered to the pavement. Dazed, he raised his hand to his head, stared a moment at the blood on his fingers.
He looked up at Clay. ‘Please…’ he said. ‘I…’
Clay crouched, reached for his Glock. He’d just taken hold of the grip when Tall scrambled to his feet and started to run.
By now Moonface had started to recover. Swaying on his knees, he reached towards his boot with his undamaged hand. Clay stepped left, balanced himself and let go a side-kick to Moonface’s head. The cop toppled over, arms at his sides, unconscious.
Tall was already halfway to the corner. Clay sprinted after him.
It was dark, the lanes were narrow, and Tall was fast. Within thirty seconds, the cop had opened up a fifty-metre lead. He was heading downhill, towards the City of the Dead. Halfway down a long, curving street lined with parked trucks, Tall darted into a side street. By the time Clay reached the corner, Tall had disappeared.
Clay kept going, jogging now, breathing hard. He came to a row of small local restaurants with open air benches that encroached onto the street. People milled about the counters and wandered the lane. Faces stared out at him as he checked right and left. Tall was gone. He’d lost him.
Clay checked back the way he’d come. A man emerged from one of the restaurants and started off in the other direction at a walk. His back was turned, his head wrapped in a keffiyeh. In the half-light Clay couldn’t make out his face, but the build looked right. Clay followed, closing the distance, keeping to the dark side of the street. At the next corner the man stopped. Clay watched as he looked left, right, then set off again at a quick walk.
If it was Tall, he showed no sign of knowing he was being followed, and with each passing minute his pace slowed. Soon he reached the City of the Dead, the first tombs, the first makeshift shelters, the dead and the living sharing the same ground. The man had just reached a particularly large and elaborate tomb, the resting place of some rich now-forgotten family, when he stopped. The lights of Cairo shone in the distance, yellow and diffuse through the smoke. Clay tucked in behind an adjacent tomb. Like the others, it was crumbling and derelict, and showed signs of recent occupation by squatters – scattered tins and bottles, rags spread over what appeared to be a cardboard sleeping place, a pile of shit in one corner, fetid and reeking.
The man hunched over, hands on knees, breathing heavily. After a while he straightened, lit a cigarette. He inhaled deeply, exhaled long. He was looking the other way, towards the city. The street was deserted. Clay emerged from his hide and started towards the man at a fast walk. He was three paces away when the man spun around.
‘Stop,’ said Tall, pulling a knife from under his jacket. ‘Get back. You don’t need to…’
But Clay didn’t stop, didn’t break stride. He hit Tall square in the chest with a straight kick, sending him staggering. Tall jabbed out with the blade, getting off a couple of quick underhand stabs before Clay’s fist ploughed into his face. As the cop slumped back, Clay wrapped the man’s knife arm tight at the elbow, stepped across his body, and flung him over his hip. Tall crashed to the ground.
Looking back, he should have stopped there. If he’d been a better man he might have. But he wasn’t, and he didn’t. It all happened so fast there wasn’t time to pull away from it. Clay pushed his left shin down hard onto Tall’s head, crushing it to the ground.
‘Please,’ whimpered Tall. ‘I am trying—’
But before he could finish, Clay extended the cop’s knife arm, straightening it back against the natural bend of the elbow, and drove it down hard across the top of his right knee. Tall screamed as the ligaments in his elbow and shoulder ruptured. But his cries were short-lived. Half a second later, Clay raised his boot and smashed his heel into Tall’s face. The cop let out a gasp and went quiet.
Clay stood looking down at the man. Blood flowed from his shattered nose and the corner of his mouth. The knife lay in the dirt beside him, its blade glistening wet. Whoever he was, he was still breathing. Clay crouched beside him and went through his pockets. A wallet with a few thousand Egyptian pounds in it, a bank card, a faded photo of a young boy in a school uniform, another of the same boy with Tall and a plain-looking woman in a headscarf. An Egyptian police ID card. And in the front trouser pocket, a thick roll of cash – new US fifty-dollar bills, a lot of them. Payday? Not in US dollars. Not this kind of money. Cops, perhaps. But not normal ones.
Clay started towards the highway.
As the flood of adrenaline burned away and was replaced by the warm gush of dopamine, he knew that there was still time. Time to change this. All of it. Fractions of seconds, yes. Eons perhaps. Enough. All the time there ever was. And he also knew that the direction lay ahead. Down this street of tombs. Through the choking miasma of burning plastic and cadmium-thickened smoke. Past the stink of open sewers and makeshift tomb-homes and the bodies of rotting animals. Away from this place. Back, perhaps, to something he’d thought was lost.
He loped towards the main road. Had she waited? Or had she disappeared again, as she had so many times before? Dogs barked. Televisions droned, flickering blue from the windows of a thousand rooms. Somewhere behind him someone shouted into the night, called for help. Clay kept going. Could their destinies ever converge? Or was the evidence of three years a whole and blistering truth that he had wilfully ignored? And yet she had called him here. Called for his help. It did not matter why. He was blind. And he did not care.
He emerged from the City of the Dead onto the broad curve of the highway. The lights of the citadel and the Mohammed Ali mosque glowed in the distance. A black, starless sky weighed over the city. He started down the road, the first pain signals detonating in his brain. Cars sped by, a strobing countercurrent of white and red lights. The cops hadn’t called in backup. They’d had no radios. Neither was carrying a phone. He knew now that they were working off-line, outside the system.
A taxi rolled up beside him. The driver gave him a couple of shots on the horn. Clay raised his hand to his chest, the sign for no thanks, kept his head down, kept walking. The taxi slowed. Clay stopped, faced the vehicle. The rear window was coming down. Clay stepped back, reached to the small of his back, palmed the Glock’s handle.
A face appeared in the open window.
‘Get in,’ she said.
13th November 1997. Cairo, Egypt. 03:40 hrs
You lie, there on the floor, with your jacket spread over you. I watch your shoulders rise and fall, hear the steady sigh of your breathing as you sleep. In the light from the street I can see the fresh bandage pale on your left forearm, and the torn, blood-stained gash on your left trouser leg, just below your waist. Whenever I see you, mon amour, you are like this – cut or bruised or shot. And I know that inside the damage is worse.
Last night, when I asked you to intercept those policemen, I thought I might never see you again. Forgive me, Claymore, but I was ready to sacrifice you to save myself and Samira’s daughters. I think back and I know this to be the truth. What am I becoming? Am I so obsessed that I would wish you dead? Or, perhaps, did I trust you to keep the policemen away? Knowing you as I do, should I be surprised at the state you are in? I know now that you would do anything for me. It is a terrible realisation, a hateful responsibility, one that I did not ask for. And yet, when the time came, I deployed you as one would a soldier in a battle, knowing what the consequences might be. And you obeyed.
And now you are here, sleeping so close to me.
I shiver and pull the bedclothes up around my neck. We share a room, but not a bed. A bond, but not a life.
The two girls are asleep in the lounge room, on
e on the settee, the other on cushions our hostess laid on the floor and fashioned into a mattress with a fitted bed sheet. They are good girls. Samira has raised them well, despite everything she has had to contend with. They did not complain once. I know that, after everything we have been through together, they trust me.
Yesterday, when you joined us in the taxi, you sat in the back seat, beside the girls. Your right hand was dark with blood and you kept it pushed down on your leg. Thank God it was night. You looked me in the eyes and told the taxi driver to go to Zamalek. Your Arabic is as rough as ever.
Hello, beautiful, you said in English, gazing into my eyes. I could see the pain there. The pain of your wounds, but also the damage I have done you over these past years.
I tried to respond, but something held me back. Was it the shock of having you so close again, of seeing your blood dripping to the floor of the taxi, the thought of all that we could have shared? Every time I thought I might speak, something held me back, so that the longer I remained silent, the more hollow anything I might say would sound. There was – there is – so much to say. And yet, as we drove through the night-lit city, I said nothing, until the echo of your two words filled the small space inside the car to rupturing.
I do not feel beautiful, Claymore. Quite the opposite. I sent you into a fight I knew might you cost your life. I feel dirty and befouled. I made a whore of myself. The widow-whore. How many of my sisters have been forced down this road of ugliness? And yet I chose it. My heart breaks. I have violated, and been violated. And worse, I have been made to betray my convictions. I am a murderer. And I know that, soon, I shall have to tell you all of this, and shatter your illusions of me. I am ugly.
But then, as we crossed the Nile into Zamalek, you reached out to me. You touched me on the shoulder with your stump. I reached up and put my hand over it, and you did not pull away. I sat in the darkness, not caring what the taxi driver might think, and ran my hands over the intimate, bloody topography of that calloused surface. Then I closed my eyes and traced my fingers along the big veins up the warm inside of your forearm and into the soft damp crook of your elbow. I know you could feel my hands quivering. Do you know, Claymore? Do you understand?
And then we arrived. You told the driver to stop in an alley behind a newish apartment building. I paid. We stood in the darkness and watched the taxi disappear. Then you led us through the streets of Zamalek. We walked another fifteen minutes. I could see you limping, cradling your arm. Finally we came to a crumbling, old pre-revolution apartment block. We climbed the stairs and came in here.
I remember you mentioning your friend Atef when we first met in Yemen, that time we walked out to the ocean side of the crater in Aden. You had brought a picnic dinner, which we ate on the rocks as we watched the sun go down over the Indian Ocean. It was very beautiful, and it seemed as if we were alone at the edge of the world. I complimented you on the food, and you told me that Atef, your friend, had made everything. I had only agreed to come with you because I needed information from you. But I know now that even then I loved you.
Atef’s wife is a nurse at one of the local hospitals. She has cleaned your wounds, sewed you, bandaged you well. She gave you painkillers and a sedative, and you slept. Not before insisting that I take the bed, of course. Sometimes, chéri, your old-fashioned ways are ridiculous.
I resist the temptation to wake you. I have been lying here for more than an hour, watching you sleep. I know that tomorrow I will have to tell you everything. I also know that I will lie. I will say I am telling you everything. But I will not. How can I? I now know how difficult it has been for you, opening your past to me. I understand now, chéri. And I also know that you will want to take me away, and I will have to tell you that it is impossible for me to run.
And yet there is time, now, before the sun rises. I imagine myself creeping to your side, kissing your face, pulling you into bed, holding you tight and close and warm until the day comes. And yet I do not. My husband is not yet one month dead. Hours ago, a man forced himself inside me. And yet, dear God, I lie here in flames. Desire for you consumes me, eats away at everything I was taught to respect and believe, burns away my morals, as if it were not the greatest gift of God, but a vile disease over which I am powerless.
Allah, most merciful, if you are out there, guide me.
All That Remained
When he woke, the bed was empty.
Memory sent a hit of adrenaline pulsing through him, pushing away the vestiges of sleep. Was she gone? He raised himself up, felt the pain flow through his arm and hip, and shuffled to the bedroom door. He grabbed the door handle and was about to turn it when he heard voices. Two women, talking. Atef’s wife, and then, after a while, the other woman replying. Rania.
Clay exhaled long, let go the handle. She was still here. She hadn’t run. And yet, after what had happened in the City of the Dead, he knew that they would have to leave Atef’s place as soon as they could. If the two men he’d attacked had indeed been cops, then his description would already be circulating the city. They needed to return the girls to their mother and get out of Egypt as quickly as they could.
Clay shuffled to the bathroom and closed the door. He checked his bandages. Not too bad. He hadn’t even realised he’d been cut until he was in the taxi. He knew the taller guy had hit him a couple of times, but they hadn’t felt like strikes with a blade, just punches. Adrenaline did crazy things, warped your brain, tricked your pain centre. He lowered his face to the sink, splashed himself with cold water and looked into the mirror. A stranger gazed back out at him, hollow-eyed, dripping, unrecognisable. And then, the realisation: in a few minutes, he would walk out into that room and she would be there. But before he could begin the dangerous imagining that he knew was coming, he shut it all down, pushed it deep. Whatever she might still feel for him, and he for her, there was no room for any of it now. There was space, now, only for this: survive and get out. Everything else was secondary. If you do it right, plenty of time after for all that other shit. If you don’t, none.
When he emerged from the bedroom, Rania was sitting at the dining table with Atef and the two girls. Morning light streamed through the windows, cinder grey and diffuse. Four pairs of eyes gazed up at him.
Atef stood, reached out his hand. ‘My good friend,’ he said.
‘Sabah al kha’eer,’ said Clay. Good morning.
Atef glanced at his bandage. ‘How are you?’
‘It’s nothing,’ said Clay.
‘It did not look as nothing last night, Mr Clay.’
Atef’s wife came to her husband’s side. He gathered her in under his big right arm. ‘My wife is a good nurse.’
Clay bowed. ‘Thank you,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Tonight I will change the dressing. Please, no strenuous exercise for a few days. Especially here.’ She pointed to his hip.
Clay nodded, looked to Rania. ‘We must leave very soon,’ he said. ‘We must return these young ladies to their parents.’
The girls frowned and looked to Rania, but remained silent.
‘To their mother, yes,’ said Rania. ‘But before we go, may I please use your telephone, Mr Atef? I need to call overseas. I can pay, of course.’
‘Please,’ said Atef, pointing to an old rotary telephone sitting on a side table in the lounge. ‘You are among friends. Do not speak of money.’
Rania stood, touched Atef’s arm. ‘Of course, forgive me.’
Atef and his wife went to the kitchen. Clay sat with the girls, poured himself coffee and watched Rania sit on the divan as she picked up the telephone receiver and dialled. But for the eyes, she might have been a different person to the one he’d known in Yemen and Istanbul and Cyprus. Her cheekbones cut sharp ridges above hollowed-out cheeks, underscored deep sockets. The fullness of her body was gone too, the curve of hip and breast, as if her flesh had been flensed away and all that remained was bone and ligament. And yet, as she turned toward him, her eyes burned like the dark planets he
remembered.
She was talking now, in French, a brief acknowledgement; then she listened. She scribbled something on a piece of paper, hung up the phone and looked at her watch.
Five minutes later, she picked up the phone again, dialled, waited. She glanced up at Clay and nodded. Clay tried a half-smile. He heard the line engage, a male voice on the other end. Rania spoke briefly, listened. She nodded once, again, glanced away and back towards Clay. She was listening intently now, staring into his eyes, right through him. Then she gasped, put her hand to her mouth, held it there. Tears welled in her eyes, poured across her cheeks. She lowered her head towards the floor, spoke a question, listened to the reply, and then looked back up at Clay as she put the receiver back into its cradle.
Clay went to her. She stood and folded herself into him. He wrapped his arms around her, felt the tremors run through her body as she sobbed. He held her a long time as she cried.
‘What is it, Ra?’ he asked after a while. ‘What’s happened?’
‘God is great,’ she whispered. ‘Truly.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Eugène,’ she gasped. ‘My son.’
‘Did they find something?’
‘Yes.’
‘What is it?’
She took a deep breath, held it, exhaled slowly, looked up at him. ‘He is alive, Claymore. Alive.’
Part IV
Absolution Page 23
