Authors: Parker Bilal
‘Let him cover her up if he wants to.’
Abu Salem drew the sheet over Meera, leaving her bare right foot exposed. Makana wanted to go over and cover it. He struggled to get up only to be shoved back down again.
The man giving the orders wore a grey suit. He was tall and muscular, his hair shaved close to a hard, knobbly skull. The arcade was cleared. A perimeter was set up and a search instigated. The threat of a bomb had not occurred to the uniformed captain and he was trying hard to make up lost ground, chasing around on the heels of the shaven-headed officer like an obedient puppy.
‘I want to know who the victim was, what was her name and what was she doing here?’
‘Her name is Meera Hilal,’ Makana said from the floor. ‘She works at Blue Ibis Tours on the third floor. I told you all this already.’
The men around him cleared and the shaven-headed man peered down at Makana. ‘Why is this man handcuffed?’
The captain repeated the same question to his men as if it was an affront to his dignity.
Bewildered, the uniformed men guarding Makana looked around them in confusion.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ said the shaven-headed man.
The captain’s flabby jowls flapped soundlessly for a moment. ‘This is police business. We have a homicide inspector on the way.’
‘Don’t be stupid, man. This isn’t a case of homicide, this is political.’
Makana found himself being hauled to his feet and thrust through the crowd and into the back of one of the Jeeps which had a section separated from the rest of the car by a wire screen. He was still handcuffed. He was alone, apart from the driver who sat behind the wheel fiddling with the short-wave radio.
‘Who is that man?’ Makana asked.
‘Lieutenant Sharqi? He’s the best. Ex-paratrooper.’
So they were a branch of military intelligence. But how and why had they become involved? And how were they alerted so quickly? Through the window Makana saw Yousef standing off to one side, talking to the man in the brown shirt. Were they just chatting, or was there a connection there? The front door of the Jeep opened and Lieutenant Sharqi leaned in.
‘So, you see an armed man shooting and you attack him. Do you have military training?’
‘I wasn’t thinking clearly.’ Makana rubbed his wrists.
‘No, you weren’t. It was a very foolish thing to do. You are lucky you weren’t killed.’ Sharqi studied Makana for a long moment. ‘Also very brave. Did you get a look at him?’
‘He had a scarf over his face.’
Someone handed him Makana’s identity card.
‘So, you are a guest in our country.’
‘My papers are in order.’
‘I’m sure they are.’ Sharqi tapped the identity card against his thumb. ‘A Coptic woman is gunned down, and a foreign man is the closest to her. Do you know what that adds up to?’
‘No.’
‘Neither do I, but I don’t like it. Not one little bit.’
A crowd had gathered around the entrance to the building. Onlookers stared and speculated. Vendors slipped through holding up boxes of tissues, fly swats, plastic train sets driven by yellow bears. A police car pulled to a halt and Inspector Wasim Okasha got out, pushing people aside in his usual brusque fashion. Trucks unloaded trains of men with riot shields and batons who stood around looking bored. An ambulance siren played a hesitant ululation as it drew up to the entrance of the shopping arcade. It was obscured by people. The tumult cleared momentarily, the way a gust of wind parts a dust storm, and Makana glimpsed the covered stretcher being lifted unceremoniously over the row of parked cars, swaying anxiously in the air as if it might just slip loose and fly upwards into the sky, before disappearing into the forest of people once more.
ii
Okasha’s upper lip curled in distaste as his eye ran over the grubby walls of the café in the arcade. It was the most logical place to commandeer but that didn’t mean he had to like it. The two of them were alone. One of his men guarded the door.
‘How can such a place be allowed to operate? Aren’t there laws about these things?’
‘You tell me,’ said Makana, gratefully lighting a cigarette. ‘There’s a boy who makes coffee. It’s not bad. He’ll sell you cigarettes as well, if you ask him nicely.’
‘Okay, enough of the small talk. You have about two minutes to tell me how you managed to get mixed up in all this before the sheriff out there decides he can do what he wants.’
Okasha had made an impressive case of exerting his authority over Lieutenant Sharqi’s boys. He was pretty good at throwing his weight around when he had to and he cut a powerful figure, but Makana had yet to see him better this performance. Legally within his jurisdiction, he argued, it would be a dereliction of his duty to let the crime go uninvestigated. A political crime, or whatever they wanted to call it, was still a homicide and that meant it was his case. Lieutenant Sharqi had beaten a hasty retreat and was now in his car in conference with persons unknown higher up the chain of command.
‘Why are they so keen to take charge of this case?’
‘You know what they are like, always barging in, as if the rest of us were just idiots waiting to be told what to do. How’s your head?’
‘Still in one piece, I think.’ Makana touched a finger tenderly to the plaster that had been stuck across the cut on his forehead. ‘What do you know about this Sharqi?’
‘Oh, I’ve heard all about him. Bit of a high flyer. He was in the Special Forces Unit
777
. They were specially created by Sadat, remember, and responsible for all kinds of cock-ups including that mess in Lanarka airport. Before his time, of course, but they tried to storm a hijacked plane and ended up killing most of the passengers. They were disbanded for a while and then reformed. Well, he’s one of the new generation, trained by the Americans and all that.’
‘How did he hear about this so fast?’
‘You know what it’s like. They have informers everywhere. Someone must have got the message back to him. Who knows, maybe he’s been having a slow week,’ Okasha snorted. ‘Anyway, the point is that any minute now he’s going to get a phone call giving him official control of the investigation and I’ll have no choice but to comply.’
‘Why would he want this case?’
‘It’s political.’
‘You think it was intended that way?’
‘Of course. Why kill her like that, if not to create a spectacle? Anyway, maybe no aeroplanes have been hijacked recently. Let’s get on to what you are doing here, and don’t tell me it’s to drink coffee. Speaking of which . . . where is this boy of yours?’
As he spoke, Okasha was moving restlessly about the small café, pausing here and there, peering out through the window for any sign of an approaching officer. Moving behind the counter he flicked the pair of boxing gloves on the wall and grimaced at the state of the facilities. There was no sign of Eissa.
‘I was hired by a man upstairs – Faragalla. He thought someone was sending him threats.’
‘Threats? What kind of threats?’
‘A series of letters. Anyway, it turns out they were meant for her.’
‘Why would anyone want to kill her?’
‘I don’t think they did. I think they wanted to scare her.’
‘That’s fine, except we have a dead woman out there. That’s not a threat any more, that’s murder. I’ll need you to hand these letters over.’
‘Her husband is Ridwan Hilal.’
Okasha swore. ‘This is going to stir up the press, which means the politicians are going to have their say, which means they are going to make my life hell.’
‘There was a man next to me the instant it happened.’
‘Coincidence. Could be anything.’
‘Coincidence that he had a two-way radio? He’s the reason they got here so quickly.’
Okasha lifted a dirty coffee pot and dropped it into the sink. ‘You’re too paranoid, and I say this as a friend. Why was a woman like that working in a place like this?’
‘She lost her job when her husband was thrown out of the university.’
‘Why didn’t they leave? Life can’t have been easy. They both lost their positions.’
‘They believed in this country.’
‘May Allah bestow His blessings upon them.’
Makana looked down the arcade towards the broken shop window and the people gathered around the spot where Meera had died. He could see one of Sharqi’s men being fielded by one of Okasha’s officers, who had no doubt been briefed to stall them for as long as possible.
‘Okay,’ said Okasha, seeing the same thing. ‘Time’s almost up. This case is going to be out of my hands in about two minutes. I need to see those letters, so do yourself a favour and don’t tell him about them.’
‘You’re asking me not to tell him what I know? Isn’t that illegal? And why do you want the letters if he’s going to take over the case?’
‘Because we both know Sharqi is going to run around and shoot a few people like a good boy and make the minister fall in love with him all over again, but the case is not going to get solved. Then it will get thrown back to me, like you throw a bone to a dog,’ Okasha grimaced. ‘And it will be up to me to solve the case or lose my job. I speak to you as one policeman to another. I need as much help as I can get and that means it’s your turn to do me a favour. He probably won’t even bother to question you again.’
Okasha was spelling out his limitations. He would go out of the way to help him so long as there was no conflict with his own orders. It was the one thing about him Makana had never understood, Okasha’s adherence to the rules, when everything around him reeked of corruption and incompetence.
‘Lieutenant Sharqi would like a word with you, sir,’ said the plain-clothes man, having made it through Okasha’s fence.
‘Thank you, I’ll be right there,’ Okasha said.
‘What about me?’ Makana asked.
The man glanced at him and shrugged. ‘You’re free to go.’
Okasha raised his eyebrows as if to say, I told you so.
Makana did some shopping on his way home, stocking up on cigarettes from a twelve-year-old on a corner which reminded him of Eissa and his stolen cigarettes. He wondered where he had got to. Some instinct made him stop at a grocery store that was so crowded with goods there was barely room for customers. He had to edge his way up and down the cramped aisles trying to remember what the point of food was and idly picking up a couple of tins, fava beans and stuffed vine leaves, and even recklessly adding Spanish sardines and a packet of pasta made with American wheat. He was standing in line to pay when the whole idea of eating struck him as completely absurd and leaving his goods on the counter he walked straight out.
On the upper deck of the
awama
he slumped back into the old armchair and gazed out over the railings at the river and the distant bridge. The sound of children’s laughter drifted across the river from a playground in one of the leisure clubs on the Zamalek side. It made him think of Nasra. His daughter would have been nearly sixteen by now. A feeling of great sadness came over him and the events of ten years ago came back as if they had occurred only yesterday.
Meera’s death puzzled him. If the intention was to kill her as a political statement why had the gunman not cried ‘
Allahu akbar
’
or some other religious sentiment? If not religion, then what was the motive? And there was something else, something about the shooter that had lodged awkwardly in his head. He replayed the whole event in his mind over and over.
After a time he realised that thinking made him hungry after all. In the kitchen he found the remains of a pot of koshari he had bought from Abu Siniya’s stand under the overpass four days ago. It didn’t smell too bad and with a squeeze of lime juice and some hot pepper it was miraculously restored to something edible. He started eating and then thought of something, so he set down the pot and went out onto the lower deck. He moved aft to a point where he lay down against the cold wood and reached down over the side, his hand scrabbling about until he found the narrow chain. He hauled it up carefully, the water trickling over his fingers and wetting his clothes. At the end of the chain a sturdy canvas bag was tied. Unlocking the chain he opened this and reached inside to extract a heavy plastic bag. Retying the canvas and making sure the horseshoe inside it was still there, he dropped it back over the side, hearing the chain paying itself out.
Back upstairs he opened the plastic bag and took out a cloth-wrapped package that was dry. Inside was a
9
mm Beretta. Makana spent the next hour or so taking the gun to pieces, cleaning it carefully and oiling it. He didn’t like guns, but this seemed like a good moment to become reacquainted with one. Checking the shells in the clip he put the whole thing back together again. He had taken the gun from somebody a few years ago and held onto it since. Officially, he had no licence for it and kept it for emergencies only, which he felt this qualified as.
It was while he was reassembling the gun that he recalled the sight of the gun in the hand of the killer. It had seemed big, more than big. It had made him think of a toy. And there was another thing. When he had crashed into him and brought him down, he had been surprised at how little the man weighed. He set the Beretta down on the table. It hadn’t been a man at all, he realised. The killer had been a boy.