The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  He always wore his shirt with its many pockets, even if he had to keep it open, baring his chest. He was unshaven. He hadn’t had time that morning. It suited him, slightly veiling his excessively hollow cheeks, reducing the impression that his mouth was too fleshy.

  Jeremy ran a hand across his face.

  His nose was slender, hooked.

  His eyebrows ebony-black.

  And a coppery halo emanated from his bare forehead, which was surrounded by black hair, smoothed back.

  To hear the women who chatted on the terraces, sipping their sahleeb outside the clubs he frequented from time to time, Jeremy Matheson was “ardently desirable.”

  The brutishness of Africa and British elegance had come together in the same man.

  Everyone knew that he was a detective, and a brilliant hunter, who had already been on a reckless safari in the wilds of the Great South.

  Everyone also knew that no woman in Cairo could boast of having shared her bed with Jeremy Matheson.

  People whispered that he was highly selective.

  And secretive.

  There were rumors …

  * * *

  The glass tinkled as Jeremy placed it on the table. He cracked the joints of his fingers, which were very long and vigorous, like his hands, which attracted many glances from the women of Cairo’s colonial society. He rose and opened the door of the rail car.

  A flight of three steps led to the canopy that was attached to the side wall. A carpet covered the sand, with chaise longues, a wooden pole, and several cases of equipment and food, labeled ARMY PROPERTY.

  Jeremy nonchalantly pulled out a chair and sat down in front of the tent.

  The night calmed the sun’s ardor. It was much nicer now, but it would take another hour or two before the interior of the rail car cooled down.

  Opposite him, rails wove across a landscape he loved, a procession of endless worms, undulating in the moonlight, heading toward infinity, just like the skein of existence.

  And lower down, behind the building that housed the rail museum, beneath the massive mouth of orange stone, the central rail station cocooned its steel snakes and its anonymous travelers in the shelter of its vaulted roof.

  About a hundred yards from the carriage where Jeremy Matheson lived, a streetcar jolted past, wearing its sparking crown of electricity like a headdress. The line served the beautiful districts of Heliopolis, away from the city. Inside, women and men traveled separately.

  The faces were smiling; one young woman was even laughing out loud. There were lots of young Westerners.

  Jeremy watched them until the streetcar was no more than a blur with shining red lights.

  His lips pursed and began to whiten.

  He swallowed noisily.

  His hand searched the pocket of his beige linen trousers.

  From it, he took a small piece of torn paper. Several lines of elegant handwriting filled the first half of it. Jeremy’s hand masked its content.

  All except what was written at the bottom.

  “Samir. 5 years old.”

  Jeremy’s hand clenched into a fist.

  Despite all the resilience he was summoning up to stifle this pain in his throat, the lower rims of his eyes began to swell with moisture.

  His jaw jutted beneath the fine skin of his cheeks.

  Like veritable Cyclops of the heavens, the millions of stars trained their lone eyes upon him, trembling and immaculate.

  A droplet fell beside Samir’s name.

  The paper absorbed it instantly.

  It grew within the fibers, broadening more and more until it touched the edges of the name.

  10

  When Brother Damien came to fetch Marion that Tuesday morning, she was looking cheerful and trim.

  She was wearing a white woollen coat over her sweater and jeans, a hat of the same material, and a bag was slung across her chest. Her abundant hair was hidden under the hat, and Brother Damien paid real attention to her features, in a way he had not yet done. He noticed the green of her irises, which looked less lifeless in the cold. Her rounded cheekbones gave her a Slavic appearance.

  He wondered for a brief moment about that injury to her lower lip, before driving the curiosity from his mind.

  They reached Avranches before half-past nine, and went directly up to the attic.

  They inventoried the works in silence until midday, when the brother suggested going out for lunch. Marion had hoped she could get away on her own to read the journal, which she had brought in her bag, but the circumstances hardly lent themselves to it. The library’s curator insisted on inviting them to eat with him, in order to paint them a detailed history of the Mont-Saint-Michel manuscripts.

  She didn’t know if it was because of the concentration needed to read titles in the semidarkness, or the dust, but she was starting to get a migraine when she got back, late that afternoon.

  She found some painkillers in a cupboard in the bathroom, and lay down on the bed until the pain began to fade.

  The twilight cradled her until her sight clouded.

  She slipped into unconsciousness.

  All she could see now was the open wardrobe.

  The different-colored stripes of her clothes piled on top of one another.

  The colors were mingling …

  A sharp focus returned. Suddenly Marion could make out perfectly the details of her clothes.

  The sleeves of her shirts weren’t properly folded; they were sticking out at the sides. That wasn’t like her at all.

  She knew she was a fanatic about that sort of thing. Everything had to be impeccably arranged so that she didn’t have to iron it again in the morning. And as it happened, she remembered quite clearly having cursed at the lack of coat hangers; she had taken very special care to fold her shirts in piles, the sleeves skillfully folded underneath.

  And now they were sticking out. Not all of them, but some.

  Sufficient for her to know that somebody had moved the clothes. Or at least lifted them up.

  Marion leaped out of bed. Too quickly. Her head spun.

  She stood at the end of the bed until her dizziness disappeared.

  Then she inspected the bedroom. The sofa, the bed, the bathroom. She did the same downstairs.

  She had difficulty breathing, searching every nook and cranny, ready to shout out and strike the slightest suspect shape.

  She came back regularly to the front door, watching the telephone, checking that it was still there.

  She didn’t know the place well enough. She hadn’t yet had enough time to get to know it properly, so it was difficult to know if anything else had moved. And yet a persistent intuition whispered to her that this was indeed the case.

  Should she ring the DST straightaway?

  The house was empty; there was nobody there, no direct danger.

  Someone had got into her house during her absence.

  She forced herself to breathe more normally.

  Nobody had traced her here, nobody. She was safe. The DST had taken care of that. That was their job, they were professionals; she had nothing to fear.

  Her heart gradually started to beat in a more regular rhythm.

  The lock hadn’t been forced.

  Someone from the brotherhood. Whoever had the key to the house.

  This time it was too much. She seized the phone and dialed one of the numbers Sister Anne had written down.

  She heard the singsong voice of Sister Gabriela.

  “Sister Gabriela, it’s Marion. Could you put Sister Anne on, please?”

  She didn’t have to wait long. Sister Anne picked up the handset almost immediately. “What can I do for you? Are you joining us for din—”

  “Who has the keys to my house?” asked Marion.

  “What? Hasn’t something ha—”

  “Who has the keys?”

  “Well … we do. I mean, the brotherhood. There is a copy of all of our keys here, at the abbot’s residence. The majority of the brothe
rs and sisters use them every day to get about, and there are keys to all the doors, including the ones to our different buildings, such as the one you’re living in. What’s wrong, Marion? I can sense you are nervous. Is there a problem?”

  Marion mentally analyzed her reply; she hadn’t expected this.

  “Marion?”

  “Yes … no, no problem. I … I had an attack of paranoia, I’m sorry…”

  “Then come up and join us for supper, we—”

  “No, thank you, but I shall stay here. I have things to occupy me. Thank you, good night.”

  She hung up.

  The entire brotherhood had keys to her quarters.

  So what now? What was happening to her? It wasn’t a case of identifying a suspect, and she wasn’t at the heart of a conspiracy either.

  But somebody had entered her home to search through her things.

  Sister Anne or one of the others, she assumed, to reassure herself that I didn’t have anything that might be dangerous for me.… No weapons.… She’s in charge of my safety, or of keeping an eye on me, and she’s making sure that if I get depressed I’m not going to do anything silly.… That’s what I’d do in her place.

  And what about the letter. The riddle?

  A game.

  Who from? And what is the point?

  To divert me, make me think about something else.…

  Marion wasn’t convinced.

  All of this wasn’t clear; the ideas were all mixed up in her head. Her only certainty was, for the time being, not to give too much of herself away. Whether it was a game by the brotherhood to keep watch on her and help her to pass the time here, or the fruit of one mind, working toward a personal goal, Marion must remain in the background and observe, so as to take action when the time was right.

  That didn’t prevent her taking certain measures.

  She couldn’t call a locksmith without everyone knowing. But she could at least declare her privacy.

  She took the few items off the hall table and pushed it up against the door. As she straightened up she gave a long, slow breath. This would guarantee that nobody got through as long as she was here.

  The precaution was rather excessive, it seemed to her.

  If she really was at some kind of risk a hall table wouldn’t protect her. It would be better to call the DST immediately and tell them about the problem. On the other hand, if she really believed that all of this was the result of measures designed to protect her, she had nothing to fear and her improvised “blockade” had no purpose.

  But it does. For me. For my head. So that I can sleep, reassured.

  And it didn’t do any harm to anyone.

  That evening, Marion didn’t eat much. She spent most of her time watching the door from the sofa, while half-watching the television.

  Her mind came back regularly to Jeremy Matheson’s diary. He had a way of talking about his life that was very much his own, a way of describing the place where he stayed, that once-luxurious, untidy railroad car. He presented himself as a handsome man with a total absence of modesty, and put across the melancholy that dwelled within him with an absolute lack of shame that astonished Marion. The choice of words was crucial; it filtered through in the reading. Matheson had taken time composing his journal. And, as he himself confessed, one soon realized that there was no egotistical purpose in it, but just the will to leave a record of a drama that was already making its presence felt in the early pages.

  Marion’s eagerness to read had been checked by her discovery early that evening. After that, she hadn’t felt in the right frame of mind.

  But it was returning now.

  Curiosity.

  Who was Jeremy Matheson, above and beyond this introduction?

  What kind of man could he be?

  And why this somber story of children, in which he admitted he had wept over the list of victims?

  Marion went to fetch the book with the black cover.

  She started on a bottle of gin, pouring herself a glass with some orange juice, and she sank back onto the sofa.

  The village was going to sleep before her eyes, behind the glazed window.

  She opened the book and began again at the exact place she had reached.

  11

  Detective Jeremy Matheson had connections in Cairo.

  Not only through his professional capacity, but because a good part of Cairo’s Western society knew of his existence, either by reputation or because they had requested his good offices.

  Matheson had no equal when it came to sorting out misunderstandings.

  A wayward mistress, a baksheesh that turned into a backhander and that had to be forgotten, or quite simply a request for a few judiciously gleaned nuggets of information.

  His notoriety had passed into the salons, private clubs, and parties; people whispered his name in one another’s ears like a miracle cure. For nothing about him would lead a person to think he could be this man of society. There was nothing worldly about him.

  Neither his almost savage appearance, nor his excessively withdrawn behavior. People came to him on the tips of their toes, wary and feverish at the thought of requesting a service from this unfathomable individual. He always regarded the petitioner with the same sidelong glance, lips pursed, then finished with “I’ll see what I can do.”

  And he untied knots with skill.

  His greatest qualities in this respect were his discretion, of course, and on the other hand his address book. His name was familiar to many benches in the qawha, and beside old Cairo’s public fountains, as well as to the concierges of large hotels or the secretaries at the ministries.

  Matheson had been in Cairo for nine years. He had come at his own request, as soon as he entered the police force, once he had obtained his law diploma. Cairo made sense with its exoticism, adventures, sunshine, and above all its less rigid hierarchy, more inclined to promote him swiftly and enable him to become an investigator. The reality had proved him right.

  Moreover, he enjoyed a freedom to maneuver here that it would have been impossible for him to find in London or anywhere else in England. And after nine years spent tanning his skin beneath the heat of the pyramids, he had never asked to return home. On the contrary, he did everything to ensure that his file remained forgotten in the archives. He had seen three British High Commissioners arrive, one after the other; he had been present at the anticolonial demonstrations, and at their episodes of violence; he had witnessed the birth of Egyptian independence, and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen—almost a decade filled with glory and dramatic incidents that had fascinated him. And Cairo had him in its grasp.

  His points of reference were in the line of minarets on the rooftops, in the song of the muezzins that punctuated the day in a less martial manner than Big Ben, in the splendor of an Englishman’s life among the Arabs. And also in the daily spice that wafted in from the desert onto all their heads: the threat of a danger that might rise up at any moment, in any possible form. This is how his life played out in the city of One Thousand and One Nights. Although Matheson was quintessentially British, the London fog and the predictability of life beside the Thames had lost their charm.

  Here, all Westerners had the right to carry a weapon; here, the nights might flare up in a moment under pressure from the nationalists; each meal had a flavor of antiquity. In Cairo, history was no longer made, but punctuated; people lived with it for company; the mysteries had a material quality that was found nowhere else; the legends became reality; the sand and the sun edged the city and life with a bitter taste that incited people to live ever more intensely.

  Cairo was a cobra, lurking between the Mokattam Hills and the Nile. Rather than proving lethal, its bite caused a total dependence, which could never be broken.

  The Egyptian police, under the command of Russel Pasha, carried out the main body of the investigation work, although still overseen here and there by Englishmen in strategic posts. Jeremy Matheson’s main responsibility was for matters
involving Western people or goods, but his role was above all political. Two-faced Egypt owed it to itself to function with this cumbersome, two-headed power—to satisfy sometimes the colonial whims of one set of people, sometimes the fervor for identity of the others.

  Just as he didn’t give a damn about promotion now that he was a detective, Jeremy Matheson cared nothing for this demagogic will. He served the interests of his office, beyond that of the nation, he told himself over and over again. He carried out his investigations, playing on both cultural stages like a true juggler.

  He handled the murder of a vagrant and a theft from a rich Englishman’s home in exactly the same way.

  He knew only too well how his Cairo colleagues could classify an investigation and its importance in accordance with the interests at stake, the social classes concerned, or quite simply according to their own preferences. And Matheson made it his duty to stir up ill-feeling in this world where a total absence of probity reigned. Not because he was himself a man of integrity—far from it—but simply to give the occasional hefty kick to this nest of snakes and watch them writhe about convulsively.

  Matheson had built up his own boundary, extremely narrow, yet permeable, between his official work and the work he did privately to render services. He very rarely obtained money for these services, but he nourished his address book, created biographical dossiers on this person and that person, when necessary giving himself permission to ask for a service in return. This was how his extended network of knowledge operated.

  When, at the end of February, he had heard talk in the corridors of his department about the body of a child found in an abandoned house in the northwest of the Abbasiya district, Jeremy Matheson had stopped to listen.

  The news in itself, although macabre, was not inconceivable. That part of Cairo was an assembly of hovels where death struck very often; what worried him more was the condition of the child when discovered.

  Matheson had left his office to join the two police officers. The one who had just come back from the scene still looked as pale as the sail of a felucca. He didn’t allow himself to give precise details, however he confided that the child had been broken in two around the pelvis, as if it were made of light wood, snapped at an atrocious angle, the torso bent backward, the flesh pierced by the hip bones.