The Golden Scales Page 14

  Ducking his head, he crouched down and began to run, hobble rather, in the opposite direction, down towards the exit on the river side. The pain in his knee made him grit his teeth. He was almost there when another man appeared, silhouetted against the light from the hotel’s entry at the other end of the alley. Makana had no choice. To stop now would be to present himself as a sitting target. Instead, he threw himself forward, crashing into the man, sending both of them tumbling to the ground.

  ‘Hey, what do you think you’re doing?’

  On his knees, Makana saw that the man underneath him, holding up his hands to protect himself, was none other than Sami Barakat. Makana lowered his fist.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I was waiting for you, then I heard the noise.’ Barakat sat up and dusted himself off. ‘You could have hurt me.’

  Makana winced as he put his weight on his injured knee and tried to stand. The journalist gave him a hand.

  ‘What is going on here?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ said Makana, looking back into the darkness of the alleyway. ‘I thought I warned you about following me around?’

  Together they shuffled forward into the light from the hotel.

  ‘I wanted to give you something.’ Barakat reached into his bag and handed Makana an envelope.

  ‘Couldn’t it wait?’

  ‘It’s my story. It comes out tomorrow.’

  Makana held the sheets of paper up to the light. ‘“Where is Adil Romario?”’ he read.

  ‘I’m not sure what your role in this is, but I thought I’d give you the chance to respond.’ The younger man nodded at Makana’s lamentable appearance. ‘But I’m beginning to wonder if I understand anything about you at all.’

  ‘I’m not doing your work for you,’ Makana said, thrusting the pages back at him and turning away. He tried in vain to interest a taxi in picking him up. One slowed, saw the condition of his clothes and accelerated quickly away.

  ‘I don’t want to hurt anyone,’ said Barakat. ‘Nor, I suspect, do you.’ As Makana carried on down the road, he followed. ‘She’s out of danger, by the way, in case you are interested.’

  Makana lowered his hand. ‘Who is out of danger?’

  ‘Farag’s secretary . . . didn’t you know? She was taken to hospital.’

  Makana was still staring at him when a taxi finally pulled up. Sami Barakat held out his story again, and this time Makana took it.

  Part 2

  Old Enemies

  Chapter Sixteen

  That night he dreamed the awama had sunk, that it had foundered in dark water. All his furniture, his worthless possessions, his books of poetry and travel, his torn clothes, a pair of scuffed shoes, all of it turning slowly over in moonbeams. Eels twisted their way through the rooms, seeking him out, winding their long tails through his mind, dragging him back . . .

  They had driven out together, Mek Nimr at the wheel of the dark blue police pick-up. The uniformed men up by the road waved them down with yellow beams from cheap Chinese flashlights, signalling the way through the fields. The body was lying on the ground where a farmer had come across it, half-buried in the soft loamy earth. Particles of dust swirled in the air over the dead man, like moths trapped in the headlights. They turned the body over and saw what had been done to his face. Makana fought the urge to throw up. It took him a while to understand what he was seeing. The lower jaw was shot away, both eyes gouged out. He bore little resemblance to the man Makana had once known. The feet were bare and tied at the ankles with wire that had cut deep into the skin. The soles were puffy and white. Makana pressed the tip of a Biro to them and watched the skin come away in a thick layer. One of the younger officers gave a sound as if he was going to be sick and turned away.

  ‘We’re going to find out who did this.’

  ‘Is that wise?’ asked Mek Nimr.

  Makana straightened up and turned to face him. ‘It’s our job.’

  Mek Nimr stepped closer, lowering his voice so that the other officers could not hear his words. ‘National security affairs are not our business.’

  ‘Then perhaps they should be.’

  ‘Maybe you’re not seeing this clearly.’ Mek Nimr shifted from one foot to the other. ‘You know the victim. You shouldn’t be on this case.’

  ‘Who else is going to do it?’ Makana stared at him until Mek Nimr sighed and turned away, but not before Makana saw the resentment in his eyes.

  At first he had suspected that Mek Nimr was a simple informer, that he had been recruited by someone higher up to keep an eye on his fellow policemen. But by that point he was beginning to think otherwise. Mek Nimr was ambitious. Was he planning to sacrifice Makana in order to assure himself of a faster route to the top?

  ‘How is it you know the victim, sir?’ one of the other men asked hesitantly. The question gave Makana an excuse to turn his attention back to the body lying in the headlights.

  ‘He was a colleague of my wife’s . . . a friend.’

  ‘Perhaps we should take a statement from her?’ Mek Nimr suggested. It was meant as provocation. Makana didn’t even look up.

  ‘My wife is not to be involved in this,’ he murmured, his eyes on the body.

  ‘I don’t follow. First you say you want to investigate and then you say you don’t. It seems inconsistent to me.’ Mek Nimr glanced casually around the assembled men, to see how many of them were with him.

  ‘You say she was a friend of his,’ he pressed his superior. ‘This man was an infidel, an atheist.’

  ‘An atheist?’ Makana laughed. It was almost funny. ‘He was a scientist . . . a biologist.’

  ‘He taught that we are descended from monkeys.’ Mek Nimr’s voice rose excitedly.

  ‘How is it you know so much about him?’

  ‘I read the papers.’ Again his eyes turned away, seeking darkness. Shelter.

  Never in their four years of working together had Makana seen him show the slightest interest in any printed matter beyond the captions on the cartoon page. Getting him to write a report was a thankless task. It was easier to find one of the junior officers who could type to help him out. And now suddenly Mek Nimr was an authority on Darwin?

  By then the course of events had been set. All Makana could do was stand back and watch his life disappear. Had Mek Nimr known what was to come, that day by the river? It was difficult to imagine that he had no clue. These were dangerous times. Even the Revolutionary Command Council for National Salvation, which had seized power less than two years ago, had become so paranoid that they met only with their weapons drawn and placed on the table in front of them. Within a few months some twenty officers were to face the firing squad. There was a purge of the entire system under way and Mek Nimr had read the writing on the wall early on.

  A few weeks later it was official. Major Idris announced that Mek Nimr was to command a new unit of the Revolutionary Security Force, an autonomous body which answered to nobody but the National Islamic Front. It seemed like the world had taken leave of its senses. Mek Nimr in charge of a group of armed thugs? It wasn’t that he was incompetent, far from it. He had worked diligently at Makana’s side. What Mek Nimr lacked was judgement, integrity. Left to his own devices there was no telling what he might do.

  The new unit’s duties were not exactly clear. All they seemed to do was tear around the streets in pick-ups, waving their guns in the air, scaring people. But it was all part of the new era. The regular police were sidelined. Religious piety was deemed the only significant qualification. Makana watched the justice system unravelling before him – people were arrested without cause, disappearing inside secret prisons or ‘ghost houses’, undergoing rape, torture and summary execution without trial. This was the order of the day.

  It wasn’t as if there weren’t enough cases to attend to. Bodies turned up all the time, discarded on wasteland, by the roadside, in the river. More of them than ever. Cause of death varied: drowning, contusions, asphyxiation. Homicide, once la
rgely a result of domestic strife, had entered the realm of the arbitrary. The victims were students, journalists, members of youth clubs, boy scouts. Usually, the cases would be taken out of Makana’s hands before he had managed to type up an initial report. Still, he carried on, cataloguing all the deaths that came his way, meticulously, as if by sheer force of habit he might keep the world on its proper axis. The alternative was to flee. Afterwards there wasn’t a day that didn’t go by without him wishing he had done just that.

  The cases kept coming. On a scale never before seen. Men vanished from their homes. They failed to return from work. They were dragged off buses, or out of taxis. Their cars were found parked by the side of the road with no sign of where the occupant had gone, or why. No official record of them was made in the system. Makana went on doing his job, following the evidence, right up to the inevitable wall he came up against every time. What else could he do? Like a drowning man he struggled, even when he knew he was going down for the last time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The sight of Umm Ali and her cross-eyed daughter tending the little vegetable patch that ran in an uneven strip parallel to the river added a touch of timelessness to the scene.

  Makana sipped his coffee on the upper deck. He had not slept well, and had woken to discover his body was a mass of cuts and bruises. Getting out of bed was a painful struggle. His elbow and knee ached and when he tried to stand his right ankle protested. Closing his eyes against the glare of sunlight rippling across the water, he was vaguely pondering the matter of whether it was worth visiting a doctor when the telephone began to ring, the long insistent peals echoing out over the water.

  A soft morning breeze lifted the pages of the newspaper which lay on the deck beside him, as if Iblis himself were flicking through it. Makana didn’t have to look down to remind himself of the front-page article. He had read it twice already, once the previous night and then again this morning in its full printed glory. Sami Barakat had gone to town on the story that Adil Romario had disappeared. Nobody knew where he was, and, more to the point, nobody seemed too concerned about the fact. Why the big mystery? What was the club hiding?

  The story would have shaken a few people out of their beds this morning, which Makana assumed explained the telephone calls. They had begun early and continued at regular intervals ever since. Out in the field, Umm Ali straightened up, one muddy hand to her aching back and the other shielding her eyes. She looked up at him but didn’t say anything. Earlier she had called up to remind him that the telephone was actually ringing, but now she could see that he didn’t want to answer it, and that was his business. After a time she went back to her tomatoes and cucumbers, and eventually the ringing stopped. With a sigh, Makana got to his feet and walked slowly over to the railings to stretch his aching joints.

  Sami Barakat wrote in the kind of excitable language that reminded you of one of those hysterical melodramas on television, where people scream at each other endlessly and for no apparent reason. By his disappearance Adil Romario had managed to generate exactly the kind of excitement he had been hoping to achieve in the movies.

  ‘Who has something to hide?’ blazed the headline on the inside page. At the centre of a spider’s web diagram was a picture of Adil Romario. Lines led outwards in every direction to connect with other photographs. There was Hanafi, of course, whose face the paper’s editors had managed to flatten so that he resembled a bloated toad crouched at the top of the page. To the left was a picture of Lulu Hamra, the actress who had wanted to keep her name out of the papers. Makana had promised to do his best, which had clearly not been enough. He wouldn’t be surprised if she was one of the people calling, although the context of the article was not unflattering. Lulu was described in glamorous terms as the secret love of Adil Romario’s life, who had broken the heart of ‘our hero’. Had the affair really ended, or had they eloped to Spain to be married in a secret ceremony in the ‘ancient site of Muslim glory that is the magnificent city of Granada’? Barakat certainly knew how to pile it on. It read like a concession to those readers who really had no interest in football but might be drawn to a story of tragic romance.

  The right-hand side of the page showed Clemenza, looking as despotic as Il Duce, his mouth open as he yelled at the players from the sidelines. This was the theory of most interest to football fans, namely that the Italian trainer was negotiating a lucrative deal for Adil Romario to play in Europe, the most likely buyers being Internazionale and Juventus. Clemenza still had old contacts in both clubs and was likely to make an incredible commission on any sale of the player. Why was he doing it? Because he was not happy with the way he was being treated by Saad Hanafi. More to the point, Sami Barakat noted, how would Mr Hanafi react to such treachery? It was reasonable to assume that he would not let his star player go that easily. How would he seek his revenge?

  To complete the element of intrigue there was even a shadowy figure, whose image was blacked out with a question mark over his face. Who was the mystery man on the trail of Adil Romario? The reporter described how in the course of his investigation he had come across a second person hot on Adil’s heels. A rival, had been our intrepid reporter’s first thought, but after extensive checking he had ascertained that this was not the case. So who was he? A scout sent by another football club? Or was he connected to State Security Investigations, the Mubaheth Amn al-Dawla? And if so, did the involvement of the SSI mean there was some kind of government interest in the case of Adil Romario’s disappearance? Or could there be some darker link – to the Jewish state, for example? Makana clucked his tongue impatiently. Sami Barakat left no string unplucked. Yet the populistic evocation of yet another Zionist conspiracy was really a foil to set up a more feasible, if less palatable, alternative explanation: was this mystery man linked with Hanafi’s notorious connections to the criminal underworld? Was his past catching up with him? And if so, was it in the government’s interests for this to emerge into the light of day? The possibility of a cover-up was further highlighted by the added detail that the mystery man had apparently threatened the reporter with violence if he continued to pursue the story. It wasn’t hard for Makana to see that the menacing figure with a question mark for a face was intended to be him.

  It was a lurid article, but he had to admire the deftness with which Sami Barakat had tied the pieces together into such a provocative tale. It was also courageous. There was a serious edge to the piece, which Makana liked. Barakat was not afraid of stirring things up. Nobody else had dared to speak out openly about Hanafi’s past connections to organised crime. No wonder the telephone was ringing. Everyone knew Hanafi had protection in high places. To their credit, the paper’s editorial staff lined up behind their star reporter, calling indignantly for a government commission to be charged immediately with investigating the matter. It was time to start raising questions about the links between investment in their country and illegal activities, they trumpeted. The piece would receive no real response from official circles, of course, but it implied that Hanafi was no longer as untouchable as he used to be. To Makana’s mind it once again raised the possibility that Hanafi himself was the real target of all this. Could Adil be just a means of attacking him?

  The telephone began to ring below once more. With a sigh, Makana realised that he was going to have to answer it. Then he felt, rather than heard, the big man step aboard. He looked down over the railings and saw the gorilla in a suit standing on the lower deck.

  ‘Mr Hanafi would like to see you.’

  ‘Yes.’ Makana nodded. ‘I thought he might.’

  Descending to the main cabin, he walked straight past the ringing phone.

  ‘Aren’t you going to answer that?’ The big man remained outside, looking through the doorway.

  ‘If you leave it for long enough it usually stops by itself.’

  The driver sniffed but said nothing. Makana lifted up the remains of his jacket and realised that it was in serious need of a good tailor.

  �
��Hold on a minute.’

  He retrieved another jacket which he pulled on before following the big man up the slope towards the road.

  ‘You’re pretty light on your feet. I’ll bet you used to box.’

  The man’s grin was broad and his teeth dazzlingly bright. ‘How did you guess? I was a light heavyweight. I nearly got an Olympic medal.’

  ‘Nearly?’

  The heavy shoulders heaved. ‘I wasn’t selected for the team in the end, but that was because there was money involved, you know how it is.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Makana. ‘I know how it is.’

  This time he chose to sit in the front, next to the driver. As they travelled at high speed along the riverside to Hanafi’s apartment, the driver kept up a long monologue about his career as a boxer and how he once could have been as great as Muhammad Ali. He seemed like a totally different person from the driver Makana had first set eyes on.

  ‘What did you say your name was?’

  ‘Faisal, but I fought under the name of Sindbad.’

  ‘Sindbad? I like that. How long have you been working for Hanafi?’