by Paul Sussman
‘And a Johnnie Walker as well,’ he called. ‘A double.’
He drank on for the rest of the evening, turning things over in his mind – the girl, the Gilf, Dakhla, Sandfire – losing track of how much booze he got through, drowning himself, just like the old days. A group of English girls materialized at a nearby table, one of them – elfin, dark haired, pretty – shooting glances in his direction, trying to make eye contact. He had always been attractive to the opposite sex, or so people told him, his slim, muscular frame and large brown eyes marking him out from most of his fellow Egyptologists, who tended towards the physically bland. Despite that he had never been especially confident around women, incapable of making the ice-breaking small talk at which some men excelled. And even if he had been, he certainly wasn’t in the mood for it tonight. He acknowledged the girl’s attention with a half-smile, then lifted his eyes to the pair of antlers mounted above the bar and kept them there. Twenty minutes later she and her companions left and a group of Egyptian businessmen took their table.
Around eleven, by now heavily drunk, Flin decided to call it a night and started fumbling for his wallet. As he did so he felt a hand on his shoulder. For an unpleasant moment he thought it was the fat American again. It was only Alan Peach, a colleague of his from the American University. ‘Interesting Alan’ as they called him on account of his being the most boring man in Cairo, a pottery expert whose conversation rarely ventured beyond the realms of early dynastic red-ware ceramics. He greeted Flin and, indicating a group of other university colleagues who had sat down at a table on the far side of the room, invited him to join them. Flin shook his head and explained that he was just leaving; he pulled out his wallet while Peach launched into a rambling story about an argument he’d had with one of the curators at the Egyptian Museum over a pot that in his opinion was almost certainly Badarian rather than Naqada II as it had been officially labelled. Flin zoned out, nodding every now and then but not really paying attention. It was only when he had counted out the correct money, placed it on the bar and gathered up his laptop that he realized Peach had moved on and was talking about something completely different.
‘… at Sadat Metro. Couldn’t believe it. Literally bumped right into him.’
‘What? Who?’
‘Hassan Fadawi. Literally bumped right into him. Was on my way up to Heliopolis to help with some ceramics they’d found, Third Dynasty they think, although stylistically—’
‘Fadawi?’ Flin looked shocked. ‘I thought he was …’
‘So did I,’ said Peach. ‘Got early release, apparently. Looked a broken man. Absolutely broken.’
‘Hassan Fadawi? You’re sure?’
‘Positive. I mean he’s got family money by all accounts, so financially he’s not going to—’
‘When? When did he get out?’
‘About a week ago, I think he said. Thin as a rake he was. Remember having an extremely interesting chat with him once about some Second Dynasty hieratic wine jar dockets he’d found down at Abydos. Say what you like about him, he certainly knew his pottery. Most people would have dated them Third or even Fourth, but he’d figured you wouldn’t get that sort of rim structure …’
He was talking to himself, Flin having already turned and left the room.
He should have gone straight home. Instead, unable to stop himself, he diverted via the duty-free alcohol shop on Sharia Talaat Harb, picking up a bottle of gut-rot Scotch before flagging down a taxi and giving directions back to his apartment block on the corner of Mohamed Mahmoud and Mansour.
Taib the caretaker was still up when he got back, sitting in his armchair just inside the building’s entrance, a shaal draped over his head, grimy feet thrust into old plastic sandals. They had never got on, and, drunk as he was, Flin didn’t bother to acknowledge him, walking straight past and into the ancient cage lift which rumbled its way up to the top floor.
Inside his flat he grabbed a tumbler from the kitchen, filled it with whisky and weaved his way into the living room. Flicking on the light he slumped onto the sofa. He emptied the glass, poured himself another and emptied that too, really gulping at it, aware that he was accelerating down a slippery slope, but unable to stop himself.
For five years he’d kept it under control, had barely touched the stuff. There had been cravings, of course, especially in the early days, but she’d helped him through and thanks to her he’d somehow stayed on track, slowly piecing his life back together again, like one of Alan Peach’s reconstructed pots.
Five years, and now he was chucking it all away. And he didn’t care. He just didn’t care. The girl, the Gilf, Dakhla, Sandfire and now Hassan Fadawi – it was all too much. He couldn’t hold it together any more.
He refilled the glass, emptied it again, swigged straight from the bottle, eyes veering drunkenly around the room. Random objects blurred in and out of focus – his El-Ahly football scarf, a copy of Stephen Quirke’s The Cult of Ra, a fist-sized lump of Libyan desert glass – round and round before eventually his gaze latched on to a photograph sitting on the coffee table beside the sofa. It was of a young woman. Blonde, tanned, laughing, she was wearing mirror shades and a battered suede jacket; an expanse of flat desert gravel stretched away behind her towards a distant whale-back dune. Flin stared at it, swigged, looked away and immediately back again, an expression of pained humiliation arranging itself on his face as though he had been caught doing something he had promised faithfully not to. Five seconds passed. Ten, twenty. Then, with a growl of effort, his entire body trembling as though pushing against some unseen force, he swayed upright and stumbled over to the window. Opening the shutters, he launched the whisky bottle out into the night.
‘Alex,’ he slurred, the crunch of shattering glass echoing up from the alley below. ‘Oh, Alex, what have I done?’
Cy Angleton swept a handkerchief across his forehead – Jesus, the heat in this city! – and called for another Coca-Cola. Everyone else in the café was drinking glasses of ruby-coloured tea or viscous black coffee but Angleton wouldn’t touch the stuff. Twenty years he’d been working this type of gig – Middle East, Far East, Africa – and always the same rule: if it ain’t in a can, don’t drink it. His colleagues laughed at him, called him paranoid, but it was he who did the laughing when they were doubled up with food poisoning, intestines flying out of their arseholes. If it ain’t in a can, don’t drink it. And, also: if it ain’t cooked by Americans, don’t eat it.
The Coke arrived. Angleton opened the can and took a long sip, eyeing the teenage serving boy as he wandered away among the tables, admiring the narrow hips and muscular arms. He sipped again and looked away, focusing on the matter in hand.
It had been a useful evening. Extremely useful. Part of him wondered if he hadn’t gone too far in the Windsor Hotel, shouldn’t have been quite so pointed with Brodie about the Gilf Kebir, but on balance it had been a risk worth taking. In this business you sometimes had to trust your instincts. And his instincts had told him that Brodie’s reaction would be informative. As indeed it had been. He knew something, definitely knew something. Piece by piece by piece. That’s how he liked to work. Building up a picture, teasing out the facts. That’s what he got paid for, why they always used him for this sort of thing.
Aftewards he had followed Brodie back to his apartment where he’d got chatting with the old caretaker. The man clearly disliked the Englishman, and he’d played on that, winning his confidence, slipping him some cash, which would make things easier when the time came to have a look round Brodie’s flat, as it soon would. Yes, all in all, an extremely useful evening. Piece by piece by piece.
He sipped at his Coke and gazed around at the other customers in the café. Some puffed on shisha pipes, others played dominoes; all were male. The boy walked past again and Angleton’s eyes tracked him, scenarios playing lazily through his mind, imagined embraces, wetness and sweat. He smiled and shook his head, throwing some money onto the table before standing and setting off down the str
eet. Although he had needs, he had no intention of indulging them in a place like this. Maybe when he got back to the States, but for the moment he’d make do with his own hand. Such were the rules he lived by: don’t drink the water, don’t eat the food, and above all, don’t ever touch the meat, however fierce the temptation.
Freya landed at Cairo International at 8 a.m. local time. Waiting for her at the arrivals gate was a woman named Molly Kiernan, a friend of Alex’s and the one who had called two nights back to break the news of her death.
Late fifties, with greying blond hair, sensible shoes and a small gold crucifix hanging round her neck, Kiernan came forward and hugged Freya, telling her how very sorry she was for her loss. Then, taking her arm, she shepherded her out of the international terminal and across to the domestic one for her flight down to Dakhla Oasis. This was where Alex had lived and where her funeral was to take place the following day.
‘You’re sure you won’t stay in Cairo and fly down with me tomorrow?’ Kiernan asked as they walked. ‘I’ve got a spare bed.’
Freya thanked her, but said she would prefer to head south immediately. She wanted to see her sister one last time before the funeral, to say her goodbyes.
‘Of course, my dear,’ said the older woman, squeezing Freya’s hand. ‘Zahir al-Sabri will meet you at the other end – he worked with Alex. He’s a good man, a bit surly. He’ll take you to the hospital and then over to her house. If you need anything, anything at all …’
She handed Freya a card: Molly Kiernan, Regional Co-ordinator, USAID. A mobile number was scribbled on the back.
At the domestic terminal Freya checked in, one of only four people to do so. Flashing some sort of pass and speaking to the security men in fluent Arabic, Kiernan was allowed to accompany her through to the departures lounge, where she waited with her until her flight was called, neither of them saying very much. Only when they had started to board and Freya had joined the queue for the bus that would take her out to the plane, did she vocalize what had been tearing at her ever since she had received the news of her sister’s death:
‘I just can’t believe Alex would kill herself. I just can’t believe it. Not Alex.’
If she was looking for an explanation she didn’t get it. Kiernan simply hugged her again, stroked a hand down her hair and, with a final ‘I’m so very sorry’, turned and walked away.
Once airborne Freya stared distractedly down at the desert below, an endless expanse of dirty yellow dissolving into the haze of the far horizon. Here and there its surface was scored by the branching, scar-like courses of long-dried-up wadis, but for the most part it was wholly featureless. Blank, empty, desolate – just like she felt.
Morphine overdose – that’s how Alex had done it. Freya didn’t know the precise details, didn’t really want to, it was just too painful to contemplate. She’d had multiple sclerosis, apparently, a particularly aggressive form of the disease, had already lost the use of both legs and one arm, part of her sight too – Christ, it was just so heartbreakingly cruel.
‘She couldn’t bear it any more,’ Molly Kiernan had told her when she’d called to break the news. ‘Couldn’t go on. Decided to act while she still could.’
It didn’t sound like the Alex Freya knew, giving up hope like that, quitting without a fight. But then all she really had was a memory: the Alex of their childhood, with her notebooks and rock collection and old army compass from the battle of Iwo Jima. The Alex who had held her close at their parents’ funeral, and given up her career to look after her, loving and supporting her. A past Alex. A lost Alex. It was seven years since they had last spoken, and who could say how much her sister had changed in that time.
True, she’d written to Freya, once a month, regular as clockwork, dozens of letters over the years, all in that curious handwriting of hers that somehow managed to be both wild and neat at the same time. The letters had steered clear of any personal stuff, however. As though the events of that last day in Markham had somehow slammed shut the door on any deeper level of involvement between the two of them. Dakhla, the desert, the work she was doing on dune movements and the geomorphology of the Gilf Kebir Plateau, whatever the hell that was – these were the things Alex wrote about. Surface stuff, external, never delving too deep. Only the last letter, the one Freya had received just a few days before news of her sister’s death, had been different, opening up again, allowing Freya back in. But by then it was too late.
And of course Freya, convulsed with shame, had never replied to any of the letters. Not once, in seven years, had she made an attempt to reach out, to say how sorry she was, to try to repair the damage she had done.
That’s what tormented her now, even more than Alex’s actual death. The fact that she had been suffering, terribly by all accounts, and that she, Freya, had not been there for her, as Alex had always been there for her. The wasp sting, the lumbar puncture, the day she had soloed the Nose on El Capitan – her sister had never let her down, always supported her. But she had not done the same for her sister – she had failed her. For a second time.
Reaching into her pocket she pulled out the crumpled envelope with the Egypt postmark, gazing at it before again putting it away unread and staring back down at the desert below. Blank, empty, desolate. Just like she felt. Had felt for the last seven years. Would probably now always feel.
As arranged, she was met at Dakhla airport – a remote huddle of orange buildings surrounded by desert – by Alex’s colleague Zahir al-Sabri. Thin, wiry, hook-nosed, with a pencil moustache and a red-checked Bedouin imma wrapped around his head, he muttered a curt greeting and, taking her holdall – she kept her knapsack – led her across the arrivals hall and out through a set of glass doors. The mid-morning heat thumped into her as though a scalding towel had been pressed hard against her face. It had been hot in Cairo, but this was something else: the burning air seemed to drive deep down into her lungs, sucking the breath out of her.
‘How do people live in this?’ she gasped, slipping on her sunglasses against the glare.
Zahir shrugged.
‘Come in summer. Then is hot.’
There was a car park in front of the terminal building, fringed by weeping fig trees and pink-flowered oleander bushes. Zahir padded across to a battered white Toyota Land Cruiser with a luggage rack clamped to its roof, its left headlamp smashed out. Hefting her bag into the back, he threw open the passenger door and, without saying a word, climbed in the driver side and started the engine. They moved off, passing through a security point and out onto a tarmacked road – the only road – that wound away through the desert like a slash of dirty grey paint. Ahead loomed the green blur of the oasis. Behind, hemming it in and curving the length of the horizon like the rim of a giant saucer, reared a steep, cream-coloured escarpment.
‘Gebel el-Qasr,’ said Zahir. He didn’t expand on the comment, and Freya didn’t ask.
They drove fast and in silence, gravelly dunes giving way first to scatters of scrub grass, then to irrigated fields interspersed with palm, olive and citrus groves. After ten minutes a sign in Arabic and English announced they were entering Mut which, from Alex’s letters, Freya knew was Dakhla’s main settlement. A sleepy affair of two – and three-storey whitewashed buildings, it was all but deserted, its dusty streets lined with casuarina and acacia trees, its pavement edges painted with minty bands of white and green, the town’s predominant colours.
They passed a mosque, a donkey-drawn cart with a group of black-robed women sitting in the back and a line of camels wandering aimlessly along the side of the road; occasional wafts of dung and woodsmoke pushed in through the open windows. Under other circumstances Freya would have been fascinated: it was all so different, so completely alien to her own experience. As it was she just sat there gazing distractedly out of the window as they followed a wide boulevard through the town, crossing a succession of mini-roundabouts from which other boulevards radiated off in different directions so that she had the curious sensation of p
inging around a giant pinball machine.
In a matter of minutes they were out the other side and speeding through a patchwork landscape of maize fields and rice paddies. Dovecotes and palm groves drifted by, irrigation canals, strange twisted outcrops of rock until at last they came into a village of densely packed mud-brick houses. Zahir slowed and swung left through an open gateway, coming to a halt in a yard hemmed in by high mud walls topped with palm fronds. He tooted the horn and cut the engine.
‘Alex’s house?’ asked Freya, trying to match the yard and attached, ramshackle dwelling with the descriptions in her sister’s letters.
‘My house,’ said Zahir, opening the door and getting out. ‘We drink tea.’
Freya had no desire whatsoever to drink tea, but she sensed it would be impolite to refuse – Alex’s letters had made much of the importance Egyptians attached to hospitality. Tired as she was, she grabbed her knapsack and alighted as well.
Zahir led her into the building and along a corridor – dark and cool, smells of smoke and cooking oil – and into a gloomy, high-ceilinged room with pale blue walls and a mat-covered floor. Other than a cushioned bench along one of the walls and a television sitting on a table in the far corner, the space was empty. He waved her onto the bench, shouted something towards the back of the house and squatted down on the floor in front of her, his djellaba riding up to reveal white Nike trainers. Silence.
‘I hear you worked with Alex?’ she said eventually, Zahir showing no sign of starting a conversation. He grumbled an affirmative.
‘In the desert?’
He shrugged as if to say ‘where else?’
‘Doing what?’
Another shrug.
‘We drive. Far. Out to Gilf Kebir. Long way.’
He flicked his eyes up at her and then away, cricking his neck and brushing at something on his djellaba. She wanted to ask him more: about Alex’s life here, her illness, her last days, anything he knew about her, everything, desperate to gather in whatever tiny fragments of her sister she could. She held back, however, sensing that he wasn’t going to be particularly forthcoming. Molly Kiernan had warned her he was surly, but it felt like more than that. Almost antagonistic. She wondered if Alex had told him what had happened between them, why they hadn’t spoken for so long.
