The Cairo Diary

by Maxim Chattam

  Cork’s somber gaze was fixed on Jeremy. “Azim pushed his face into the sand, by crawling I imagine, in order to suffocate himself.”

  The doctor stressed the point with a nod.

  “That is what finally killed him. Oxygen deprivation. He has all the symptoms.”

  Jeremy sighed, and brought his attention back to the sticky-looking length of wood.

  “Another thing,” added the doctor. “The poor devil was brought to us as he was found, without his trousers. On the other hand he still had his jacket on, and from it I removed his wallet and … a sort of rolled-up papyrus. It is written in Arabic.”

  This time Jeremy did not hide his surprise. “A papyrus?”

  “Yes, small and in very poor condition. It must be really old.”

  “Can I pick it up?”

  Cork shrugged.

  “Of course, except that at the moment it is in the hands of a colleague. Oh, don’t worry, he is a trustworthy man! He works with the American University; they call him whenever they find skeletons in the digs. He’s an anthropologist, and he has assured me he will swiftly obtain a translation of the text for me. I shall give it all to you the minute it comes back to me.”

  Jeremy nodded and seemed on the point of leaving when he laid a hand upon the doctor’s shoulder.

  “Doctor, when you did the autopsy on the body of that young boy, you recognized him, didn’t you?”

  Cork opened his mouth and a gurgling sound rose up from his stomach and escaped. But no words emerged, just a long, weary breath.

  “He was one of the children you medically examined on behalf of the Keoraz Foundation, wasn’t he?” persisted Jeremy.

  “He was indeed a child I knew. And … I gave you to understand that, Detective.”

  Jeremy gave him a sad smile.

  “And my words should not be taken lightly,” added Dr. Cork. “When you find whoever did it, put a bullet in him from me. Personally, if I have the opportunity, I won’t hesitate for a second.”

  40

  Marion’s morale matched the color of the coffee she was stirring.

  Why did she have to go and lower her guard the previous evening? A nice evening with a friend, a touch of melancholy, the feeling that she was all alone, too alone, and she had revealed it all.

  Béatrice knew everything.

  Marion hardly knew her; her trust was based on only the most random of instincts. As she had confessed everything, she had imagined that she would feel better afterward; she’d hoped that sharing her secrets would lighten her load. But it wasn’t anything of the kind. It was worse, even.

  Not only was she no stronger, and felt no better supported; what was more, her paranoia was resurfacing. And what if Béatrice had already told the Mount’s other inhabitants everything? Worse, what if she had alerted the newspaper editors in order to sell the identity of their mysterious informant to the highest bidder?

  And, since misfortunes never came singly, she couldn’t get the chorus of Johnny Hallyday’s song “Black Is Black” out of her head: “Noir c’est noir, il n’a plus d’espoir…”, which she had heard on the radio while having her shower.

  She no longer knew what to do. Her cover was blown, as they said in spy novels. Should she call the DST and ask them to come and fetch her? What was she going to tell them by way of explanation? That one evening when she was tired, she had divulged everything? Beyond humiliation, that testified to massive negligence. Wouldn’t they be within their rights to reply that they were going to abandon her, that she would be impossible to protect if at the end of ten days she fell into a depression and revealed everything to the first person who came along?

  Marion was tired.

  Since October, her life had been nothing but unremitting anxiety, watchfulness; those who wanted her to shut up had tracked her down—they were sufficiently powerful and organized to do that—to the point of sending a motorcyclist to her underground parking lot to terrorize her. They hadn’t suspected she was in contact with the DST at that point, a state of affairs that had certainly changed since. Her enemies had to track her down, sound out each possibility, to find her. If that was the case, in future they would be less lenient, thought Marion; they wouldn’t take any more risks, and would stake their all, by killing her.

  The DST had taken it upon themselves to find a little forgotten corner so that she could be forgotten, while waiting for the judicial police to need her testimony. If they ever got to that stage …

  Her situation was nothing but a vast blur, with no line to mark the horizon.

  What have I done?

  She put her head in her hands.

  Did she have a choice? She had to wait. Until the DST contacted her. It was better that way.

  And to kill time, she still had her book.

  Thinking about it, that story was at least as crazy. By proxy, she was living through an investigation that had taken place more than seventy years previously.

  With a little luck and a morning on the Internet, she could find information complementary to this investigation and might even find out how it had all ended.

  And deprive yourself of discovering it all through the private diary?

  No, she wanted to finish it, go right to the end. Take things in order.

  Suddenly, a knot of anxiety returned and her stomach contracted.

  What if the diary came to a dead end, without divulging the story’s last word?

  Then she would somehow obtain an Internet connection, and unearth the truth by herself. If there had been an article in the Petit Journal, there would surely be more details elsewhere, in the English-speaking press at the time, in Internet archives.

  And what if the child-killer was still alive?

  Marion asked herself what she would do if she happened to meet him. An old man.

  She would denounce him to the police, of that she had no doubt.

  After such a long time, was it just ancient history?

  Not in her eyes, not when children had been slaughtered.

  Reading would distract her, carry her far from here and from her problems.

  Marion went upstairs to put some warm clothes on, and as she had done the previous day, she made herself a sandwich before adding a blanket to her bag. She left late in the morning and headed back to the lofty heights of the abbey.

  She returned to the Salle des Chevaliers and its shadows, as elegant as they were threatening. It was the perfect setting to accompany her on her journey.

  Marion was nearing the end; the number of pages left to read was dwindling, and the pace quickening.

  She unfolded her blanket beneath the window she had chosen, and prepared to leave the twenty-first century.

  When she opened the flyleaf of the black book, she had the feeling that she was opening a door.

  The words were a magic spell.

  She spoke them delicately to begin with, then sped up.

  Mont-Saint-Michel disappeared.

  The sun began to shine.

  Exotic smells wafted under her nose.

  And the sounds of a bygone age rose up all around Marion.

  41

  At six o’clock in the morning, Jeremy Matheson was walking aimlessly beneath the ramparts of Saladin’s citadel. The tall towers of the Mehemet Ali mosque rose up like two candles, ensuring that a little light continued to be cast over the shadows of the city.

  His feet were bruised; he had been wandering like this for quite a while already. His mind was in turmoil. He had walked through several districts with twisted alleyways so narrow that three men could not walk abreast, and reached a less compact, less mysterious city, crossing main roads as straight and spectacular as the Champs-Elysées in Paris. It was already too early to see hordes of cars invading the streets; in two or three hours’ time, the noise of their engines would swallow the sound of the wind and of the craftsmen who were already at work.

  Jeremy went over and over the entire investigation, searching for the weak spot.

&nbs
p; Keoraz must fall.

  To begin with, Jezebel wouldn’t understand. Worse, she would certainly feel hatred toward him, for having revealed her husband’s terrible personality. However, with time all would become clear to her and she would open her eyes and see what he, Jeremy, had accomplished. She was going to have to become strong. And he would be there to support her. To prevent her from stumbling.

  He was going to hold her hand, and would walk discreetly in her wake for as long as was necessary. For her. Without asking for anything in return.

  She would be hard with him, as she generally was; intransigent and cruel. Odious, sometimes. It was a protective mechanism, her way of defending herself against the emotion he inspired in her. He could not believe that their love had turned upside-down, to the point where it had become this vicious hatred. Deep inside, she still felt an enormous affection for him, and it was this very affection that was making her crazy. She was making him pay for this feeling that overpowered her whenever they met.

  He was going to have to be patient. Loving, too.

  Support her.

  Jeremy realized that he had just crossed Saladin Square, and was now under the walls of the prison.

  The sky was whitening behind the citadel.

  Gunshots crackled, loud and furious in the dry morning air, echoing against the high, encircling walls of the inner courtyard.

  Jeremy halted and closed his eyes.

  He rummaged in his trouser pocket, found a pack of cigarettes, and lit one.

  How many of them were there? Jeremy wondered as he inhaled the tobacco smoke. What had they been thinking about in those last minutes? While he had been striding across the square, they had been emerging from their cells, knowing that they were taking their last steps, that this was their last dawn, and that they were leaving their lives, and existence altogether, because they had been unable to conform to a society that was banishing them forever.

  He was smoking peacefully here, and they already no longer existed.

  Inert bodies, riddled with bullets.

  The condemned men executed in the solemn silence of early morning, almost anonymously, as if there was a certain shame in applying the sentence.

  Behind the streetcar rails, just after a block of dwellings partially hidden by the prison, a gigantic cemetery stretched out, as big as five of Cairo’s districts. Here generation after generation fell into obscurity and were forgotten, the men and women who had filled this city. All those men who had paused one day to think about the others’ deaths, all those women who had wept over the loss of one of their own.

  Jeremy dispatched his cigarette end with a flick of the finger and walked back across the entire square, in the direction of the Hasan mosque, in order to reach the main boulevard.

  He felt exhausted, detached from his body; a sort of far-distant drunkenness.

  He waited for the first streetcar and headed back into northern Cairo, to the headquarters of the Egyptian police, where he had his office. In order to overcome his fatigue, he obtained a map of the city and drew up a list of all the hospitals near to the Shubra district. He had his strategy. His battle plan.

  If the murder of the vagabond in Shubra really was the child-killer’s first crime—it displayed the same symptoms of inhuman frenzy—then its perpetrator might perhaps have frequented the surrounding hospitals. During their last telephone conversation, Azim had briefly recounted his adventure, and his discovery of the monster: a bald black giant, with cheeks laid open over damaged jaws. He had shouted that it was a ghoul.

  The folktale explanation of this individual’s monstrous nature was not the only one.

  If such a man had killed in Shubra, then it was possible that the local hospitals knew him through having dressed his strange affliction.

  There were not very many medical establishments in the vicinity, and the Jewish hospital was quite a long way away for a man who probably had no means of travel apart from his own legs. And he probably moved around at night, so as not to be seen.

  Jeremy borrowed a car and spent two hours at the Lord Kitchener Hospital, which he knew well since it was the workplace of Dr. Cork, to whom he systematically entrusted his autopsies. Nobody seemed to remember a black giant whose face was half-eaten away.

  So he headed for the second and last establishment, the Bulaq Hospital. First a nurse recognized the description given by Jeremy, then a doctor. He was not the sort of patient one would forget.

  The man had come for treatment once, more than a month and a half previously, at the end of January. They had even attempted to have him admitted to an institution, at least for a few weeks, long enough for his health to improve, but he had fled before the vehicle arrived. The man lived on the street, and was more like a stray dog. He did not speak, had flesh missing all over his body, and was undernourished. He had been brought here forcibly, by police officers from the Shubra station, who had found him crouching in a local ruin. His terrifying appearance had at first led them to think he was a corpse, his cheeks eaten away by animals, until he moved.

  Frightened and then curious, the two local policemen had brought the giant, who had not shown any hostility.

  He had not been seen since. Either he was dead or he was very discreet, holed up in some sordid den in the area.

  As for his affliction, the doctor was uncertain. It had the look of leprosy, but was not. The man’s cheeks were eaten away, fleshless, and part of his nose had also gone, while one eye was abnormally open, almost hanging out. The giant’s jaw was impossible to open, as though it were stuck in a closed position, which explained his malnourished state, as the patient was reduced to swallowing only semiliquid foods, which he had to introduce into his mouth through the slender openings between his rotten teeth.

  Shortly after lunchtime, Jeremy was on his way back.

  Francis Keoraz had an armada of contacts at his disposal. It was entirely feasible that this sinister story of a man-beast had reached his ears and he had undertaken to find this creature, which—with good organization—had not been difficult. The individual Azim had called the ghoul was now locked away or simply housed somewhere. Keoraz was keeping him by providing him with a roof and food.

  Jeremy went to sit on the terrace of a café in the gardens of the Royal Yacht Administration, which was very close to his office and faced the Nile, in which a platinum sun was reflected.

  Mentally, he prepared his report.

  The black giant was assuredly an immigrant from the Sudan, rejected by his family because of the ugliness of his affliction, whatever it was. He had grown up in one of the hovels in Shubra, an area as wild as the savannah of the African predators. A district where neither the police nor the civilian authorities had yet penetrated, in a universe that escaped both rules and prying eyes. Alone and disfigured, he had developed according to his own mental image, inventing his own rules. Perhaps he quite simply hadn’t grown up in his mind. He was still the child who had suffered from his illness, whom his parents had rejected in the face of his contemporaries’ jeers and blows.

  Yes, the theory worked.

  And it was this hatred that was rising back to the surface.

  His barbarous nature was merely the mirror of his sufferings, and the children were in his eyes the cause of his woes, the source of his loneliness.

  He was externalizing his own inner hell.

  That held water.

  And Keoraz … the personality of Francis Keoraz was already known. Jeremy had drawn himself quite a precise picture of it, the picture of a man of power, accustomed to having everything, possessing ever more, doing ever better, without limits, until he lost himself.

  The appetite for power had engendered a spiral into dementia.

  But Keoraz was a civilized man, too imbued with this upbringing, and even if he felt beyond morality today, he was not capable of all the atrocities committed on the dead children.

  He used the ghoul.

  He manipulated the black giant, like a real puppet-master. He
pulled the strings, guiding the wounded man onto the path of hatred, initiating him into this form of outlet that killing could release. An absolute liberation, and in the end, a source of pleasure for him.

  And Keoraz enjoyed this authority; from a distance, he observed the ignoble deeds of his monster. Like a Frankenstein, he was the shadowy figure behind the creature on which everyone focused.

  No, Jeremy thought. He must specify in his final report that Keoraz did not only experience an orgasmic pleasure in this omnipotence over others and over life and death, but he was even more sordid: he literally achieved orgasm! The semen found on the roof above the crime scene where the second child had been slaughtered bore witness to that.

  While the ghoul struck, Keoraz kept his distance and watched, feeding his depraved fantasies.

  Jeremy shook his head somberly.

  Keoraz was going to get away with it.

  The millionaire was treacherous and wily. To the point of abducting his own child so as to ensure the support of public opinion and in order to establish his apparent innocence while he felt threatened by the investigation. Jeremy had no doubt that Keoraz was one of those beings apart, beyond egotism, with a permanent instinct for survival, implying that he had no real attachments, few emotions, and above all: a total feeling of detachment in relation to the world. Keoraz was, in his own eyes, simply a consciousness in the middle of a game; everything, all forms of life, were merely instruments for his own amusement, his personal development.

  There was one question that remained unanswered: To what extent was he cold and distant? Would he be capable of putting to death the fruit of his own flesh?

  Jeremy clenched his fist. Keoraz must fall.

  Only one element was lacking in order for this to happen: proof.

  A concrete sign linking him to the crimes, to this … ghoul.