by Paul Sussman
There was a muffled clicking as a photographer manoeuvred around, getting shots of Girgis and the rest of the guests.
‘As Miss Mikhail has told you,’ he intoned, ‘I am a Zabbal, and proud to be so. I was born here in Manshiet Nasser, just a few streets from this spot. As a child I worked the rubbish carts with my family, and although my circumstances have, through God’s grace, changed and improved …’
He glanced at the bishop, who smiled and nodded, stroking a hand through his beard.
‘… Manshiet Nasser nonetheless remains my home, its inhabitants my brothers and sisters.’
Polite applause. More camera clicks.
‘The Zabbaleen are integral to the life of this city,’ he went on, pulling at the cuffs of his shirt, adjusting them so that exactly the same amount of white protruded from each jacket sleeve. ‘For the last fifty years they have collected, sorted and recycled its garbage in a model of sustainable waste management. Because they sort by hand they achieve an efficiency rate that no mechanized operation can match. For the same reason, they are also uniquely susceptible to hepatitis infection from cuts and scratches incurred while carrying out the sorting. Both my father and my grandfather died from this terrible disease, and I am thus delighted to be associated with a project that will help lower infection rates by providing free hepatitis vaccinations to all who need them.’
Murmurs of approval from the audience.
‘I have already spoken for long enough, and so I shall merely thank you again for your presence here today and without further ado declare the Romani Girgis Manshiet Nasser Inoculation Centre …’
He spread his hands, indicating the courtyard in which they were gathered, the surrounding buildings, the glass doors with red crosses painted on them.
‘… open!’
Accepting a pair of scissors from Miss Mikhail, Girgis turned and, as the guests applauded, cut into the heavy ribbon that had been strung across the courtyard, the photographer going down on one knee to capture the event. For some reason the material resisted the blade and he was forced to cut again. And then again, hacking at the fabric, trying to slice it apart. Still it wouldn’t sever, and as the seconds ticked by and he continued to fumble the clapping behind slowed and faltered, giving way to embarrassed whispers and the odd giggle. His hands started to tremble, face creasing into a rictus first of annoyance, and then anger. Miss Mikhail came forward to help, tugging at the ribbon while Girgis continued to struggle with the scissors.
‘I give you money and you make a fool of me,’ he hissed underneath his breath.
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Girgis,’ she mumbled, hands trembling even more than his.
‘And tell that koos to stop taking pictures.’
Furious, he chopped again at the ribbon and it finally came apart. Rearranging his expression into a magnanimous smile he turned back to the assembled guests and held up the scissors. The applause picked up, echoing around the courtyard. He gave it a moment, then, reaching for Miss Mikhail’s hand, laid the scissors in her palm, placing them in such a way that their point pushed hard into the cushion of flesh beneath her thumb, indenting the skin, hurting her, the action carried out in such a way that only the two of them were aware of what was happening.
‘Don’t ever embarrass me again, you fat bitch,’ he murmured, the smile never leaving his face. Giving the scissors an extra push to emphasize his point, he let them go and walked back to his chair. The woman clasped her hands together in front of her, lower lip quivering.
‘Mr Romani Girgis!’ she sputtered, struggling to regain her composure. ‘Our beloved benefactor. Please show your appreciation!’
The applause redoubled as Girgis sat down, leaning forward to brush a smudge of dust off the tip of his shoe before sitting back again, head bowed modestly. Beside him the bishop leant over and laid a hand on his arm.
‘You are an example to us all, Romani. How lucky these poor souls are to have you as their protector.’
Girgis shook his head.
‘It is I who am lucky, Your Grace. To have the means to help these, my own people, to improve their lives …Truly, I am blessed.’
He lifted the bishop’s hand and kissed his ring of office, then, as if embarrassed to be talking about himself in this way, faced forward again. A group of girls in matching dresses and headscarves came to the front and started singing.
It was bullshit, of course, all of it. Manshiet Nasser his home; the Zabbaleen his brothers and sisters – utter bullshit. Girgis had loathed the place when he was growing up here, and loathed it even more now that he had clawed his way out. Vile, filthy, shit-filled, stinking, peopled by uneducated simpletons who worked their fingers to the bone, obeyed the law, said their prayers, and all for what? A life of excruciating hardship spent scrabbling over rubbish heaps and living in cockroach-infested tenements, society’s outcasts, the lowest of the low. Proud to be a Zabbal? He might as well have said he was proud to have cancer.
Appearances: that and that alone was why he still came back here, funded the various aid projects he lent his name to, played the humble son of the Church. Because it made him look good, nothing more, nothing less. Distracted attention from the less salubrious activities in which he was involved. He smiled. Amazing, really, what a bit of philanthropy could do for your image. A clinic here, a school there – Christ, even Susan Mubarak was a fan (‘A pillar of Egyptian society,’ she’d called him). For the Zabbaleen themselves he felt no more than he felt for the herds of pigs snuffling around among the Manshiet Nasser garbage dumps. Business, that’s what mattered. All that had ever mattered. That’s why he was what he was – a multimillionaire – and they were what they were: stinking paupers who spent their days sifting crap and dying of hepatitis.
The song came to an end and the girls started to troop away again, Girgis’s gaze tracking them from behind his sunglasses. They were pretty, all big green eyes and small, pert breasts, and he made a mental note to source names and addresses. Copts always commanded a greater premium in his brothels than Muslim Arabs, particularly the younger ones. Although it was years since he had been directly involved in that side of his affairs, preferring to focus his energies on higher-end activities – arms dealing, antiquities smuggling, money laundering – he nonetheless liked to keep a hand in. Bribe the girls’ parents – or failing that snatch them – and put them to work, make him some money. They wouldn’t last long, what with AIDS and the rough stuff many of his clients liked, but that wasn’t his concern. Profit was his concern. And anyway, Zabbaleen life being what it was, they probably wouldn’t do much better if they stuck around here. His smile broadened, a thin unpleasant expression as though someone had slashed his face with a scalpel.
The girls gone there were more speeches and an interminable violin recital by some overweight blind kid. Girgis did his best to look enthusiastic while taking increasingly frequent looks at his watch. When the recital was finally over everyone stood and started to file indoors for refreshments and a look around the clinic. Girgis alone declined the tour, citing work commitments, very sorry, would have loved to stay, etc. He accepted the thank-yous of the clinic’s staff, made his farewells – pointedly ignoring Miss Mikhail – and, relieved to be getting away at last, crossed the courtyard and passed through a high wooden gate out onto the street, his nostrils recoiling at the dense, sweet-sour stench of rotting garbage.
As he emerged he clicked his fingers. Two figures peeled off the wall where they had been leaning and bustled up to him. Rotund yet at the same time brawny, squat spheres of muscle, they wore grey Armani suits and, incongruously, red and white El-Ahly FC football shirts. One had a flattened boxer’s nose, the other a shredded left earlobe; other than that they were identical in every feature, each a mirror image of the other: same ring-covered fingers, same ginger hair slicked sideways across the scalp, same air of brooding menace. They hovered as Girgis removed a handkerchief and dabbed at his nose, then fell into step beside him as he started walking.
&n
bsp; They were on a steep hill, the road dropping away below them, its dirt surface pitted and strewn with litter. Higgledy-piggledy buildings pressed in on either side, the brickwork uneven and badly laid, the balconies hung with festoons of multi-coloured washing. Donkey-drawn carts rattled past, piled with giant polypropylene sacks of paper, cloth, plastic, glass and other waste; similar sacks lay heaped against every wall like mounds of engorged larvae, clogging the already narrow thoroughfare. There were wafts of woodsmoke, and the rumble of granulators, and women in black robes and bright headscarves, and everywhere – in every doorway, down every alley, through every window, up every stairwell – heap upon heap of mouldering, flyblown, malodorous garbage, as if the whole quarter was some enormous vacuum-cleaner bag into which all of the city’s trash had been inexorably sucked.
This was the world in which Romani Girgis had spent the first sixteen years of his life, and this was the world he had spent the subsequent fifty years trying, and failing, to scrub out of his system. Parisian aftershaves, Italian face creams, soaps and balms and scented emollients – no matter how much money he laid out, no matter how hard he washed and scoured it just wouldn’t go away. Never, ever could he be truly disinfected, free of the hellish filth of his youth: the stench, the germs, the rats, the cockroaches. Everywhere cockroaches. A multimillionaire and he’d give every piastre of it just to feel clean.
He speeded his step, clutching his handkerchief to his nose, his twin bodyguards barging people out of his path. The street continued steeply downwards before taking a sharp turn to the right. As it did so the buildings to either side suddenly dropped away and they emerged onto a broad, sun-drenched terrace cut into the hillside. Above, like bulging slabs of yellow cake, reared the Muqqatam cliffs, their faces carved with polychrome images of Christ and the saints. Below, the confusion of buildings and rubbish heaps swept on downwards before coming to an abrupt halt at the Al-Nasr Autoroute and the Northern Cemeteries.
A limousine – long, black, with smoked-glass windows – was parked at the side of the road, the closest it had been able to get to the clinic above. A black-suited chauffeur was standing beside it. The moment he saw them he hurried forward and opened the rear door. Girgis clambered in, letting out a gasp of relief as the door was closed behind him, sealing him within the cool, leather-scented cleanliness of the car’s interior. He pulled a packet of wipes from his pocket, ripped a couple out and began frantically to rub them over his hands and face.
‘Disgusting,’ he muttered, his body twitching as though at the feel of tiny creatures scurrying over his skin. ‘Disgusting.’
He continued wiping as the twins and chauffeur climbed into the front and the limousine pulled away, manoeuvring slowly down through the narrow streets. Outside the world drifted past – grime-blackened men hefting vast garbage sacks; women and children sorting heaps of plastic bottles; a sty full of slithery black pigs. Only when they had reached the bottom of the slope and bumped their way across a railway track onto the Autoroute, picking up speed as they headed back towards the centre of the city, did Girgis start to relax. He gave his hands a final swab and put away the wipes. Pulling out his mobile phone he checked the voice-mail. One message. He pressed the keypad and listened. Thirty seconds went by. Frowning, he pressed the key again, hearing the message through a second time. By the time it had finished the smile had returned to his face. He waited for a moment, then punched in a number and lifted the phone to his ear.
‘Something’s come up,’ he said when the connection was made, speaking in English. ‘Looks like it could be one of the crew. Call me, usual number.’
He rang off and, lifting a flap on the limousine’s armrest, took out an intercom phone.
‘Have the Agusta meet us at the house. And tell the twins they’re going down to Dakhla.’
He replaced the phone and laid his head back against the leather neck-rest.
‘Twenty-three years,’ he murmured. ‘Twenty-three years and finally … finally …’
DAKHLA OASIS
It was mid-afternoon when Freya eventually arrived back at Alex’s house. By this point she had all but persuaded herself she was imagining things and that her sister’s death had been suicide after all.
She had spent the best part of four hours at Dakhla police station – a nondescript, lemon-coloured building surrounded by watchtowers, just down the road from the hospital. Initially she had been dealt with by a local policeman. He had seemed to understand only a fraction of what she was trying to tell him and in the end someone else had been found to conduct the interview: a detective over for the day from Luxor on other business and a fluent English-speaker.
Inspector Yusuf Khalifa had been kind, efficient, and had taken her suspicions seriously, displaying an attentiveness that had, paradoxically, served to make those suspicions appear increasingly ill founded. He had gone through everything she had told Dr Rashid about Alex’s needle phobia, while scribbling notes and chain-smoking – he must have got through a pack or more of Cleopatra cigarettes over the course of the interview – before broadening the questioning.
‘Did your sister have any enemies that you know of?’ he had asked.
‘Well I hadn’t seen her for a long time,’ Freya replied, ‘but I don’t think … She never mentioned anything in her letters. She wasn’t really the sort of person who made enemies. Everyone …’
She had been going to say ‘loved Alex’ but the words caught in her throat, tears welling up in her eyes. Khalifa had pulled a tissue from a box on the desk and handed it to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ she had mumbled, embarrassed.
‘Please, Miss Hannen, no apologies are necessary. I myself lost a brother some years ago. Take as much time as you need.’
He had waited patiently for Freya to compose herself, then continued with his questions, taking things slowly, gently. Did she know if her sister had been in trouble of any sort? Was there any sign that her sister’s house had been broken into? Had Freya noticed anyone acting suspiciously near the house? Was there any reason she could think of why someone would have wanted to harm her sister?
On and on it had gone, the detective covering every possible angle, exploring every conceivable motive and scenario. By the end of the four hours it had become apparent, firstly, how little Freya knew about her own sibling, and secondly how feeble her suspicions were when viewed objectively and dispassionately. Everything, it seemed – the bruise on Alex’s shoulder, her terror of injections, the absence of a suicide note, the fact that she hadn’t seemed the sort of person to take her own life – could be explained away rationally, just as Dr Rashid had done when she had spoken to him in his office earlier.
Almost out of desperation Freya had brought up Mahmoud Garoub, the old farmer who had given her a lift on his donkey cart, the way he had leered at her and touched her leg, how she had been told to steer clear of him.
‘Maybe he’s involved in some way,’ she had suggested, scrambling round for something to keep her doubts alive.
When Khalifa had asked around the station, however, that line of inquiry had been closed off too.
‘This Garoub is well known to the police,’ he had informed Freya. ‘A notorious … how do you say? … peeping Joe?’
‘Tom,’ she corrected.
‘Exactly. A dirty man, according to my colleagues, but harmless. Certainly not capable of murder.’
He lit another cigarette, adding: ‘Apparently it’s his wife who’s the violent one. Mainly towards him.’
In the end it had all boiled down to the issue of where Alex had injected herself: how could someone with a paralysed left arm stick a needle into their right arm? It had been a major stumbling block, and the reason the interview had become so protracted. Then, towards the end of the afternoon, Dr Rashid, who had returned to the hospital, had telephoned and spoken to Khalifa. He had been in touch with colleagues, Rashid explained, neurological experts in the UK and the US, far more experienced in this sort of thing than he was and,
contrary to what he had earlier told Freya, it transpired there were recorded instances of people with Marburg’s experiencing a sudden and unexplained remission of symptoms. One case was eerily similar to Alex’s. Three years earlier, a Swedish man who had lost motor function in all four limbs had woken up one morning to discover that he could use his right arm again, a window of opportunity he had exploited by removing a pistol from his bedside drawer and blowing his brains out.
Why, if she was right handed, Alex should have chosen to inject herself with her left hand – that the doctor couldn’t explain. The point was that from a medical perspective it was perfectly feasible that Alex could have injected herself in the way she had. Unusual, certainly, but feasible nonetheless.
Khalifa had relayed all this to Freya once he had put the phone down.
‘I feel stupid,’ she said.
‘No, no,’ he admonished her. ‘You were quite right to ask questions. Your doubts were perfectly justified.’
‘I’ve wasted your time.’
‘On the contrary, you have done me a considerable favour – were it not for you I would have had to spend the afternoon in a conference on policing systems in the New Valley Governate. I am for ever in your debt.’
She had smiled, relieved that her suspicions seemed to be baseless.
‘If you still have any concerns,’ he said.
‘I don’t, really I don’t …’
‘Because there are other avenues we could explore. What happened to the morphine bottle and syringe, where the morphine was purchased …’
It now seemed to be he who was trying to persuade her that Alex’s death needed more investigation.
‘Honestly,’ she said, ‘you’ve done more than enough. I’d just like to get back to Alex’s house. It’s been a long day.’
‘Of course. I will arrange for a driver.’
Opening the door of the office in which they had been talking, the detective led her along a corridor and down a staircase to the ground floor. There he spoke in Arabic to the uniformed officer on the front desk; requesting a car, Freya assumed. By way of reply the officer had nodded towards the front entrance, through which Zahir could be seen sitting in his Land Cruiser on the street outside, fingers drumming on the steering wheel. How he had found out she was at the police station Freya didn’t know, but as soon as he saw them he leant across and opened the Toyota’s passenger door, in the process throwing Khalifa a not entirely friendly look.
