by Parker Bilal
There were no lights on in the office, and at first Makana assumed it was empty. The main area of the lab was taken up by six large steel dissection tables that faced one another in rows of three. All of these were empty now and meticulously washed down, scrubbed clean to be ready for the next day. The glass jars containing human organs suspended in yellowing fluids looked more tired than usual. In one a complete foetus floated upright. In another a human brain, elsewhere a spleen, a pair of blackened lungs. The laboratory was primarily intended as a teaching facility. Charts on the walls and a long blackboard added to the educational atmosphere.
It took him a second to realise there was actually somebody there. A figure sitting in darkness – Doctora Siham. She had her face buried in her hands. Makana, suddenly confused as to how to proceed, stood for a moment before tapping on the doorframe. Startled, she jerked back and for a brief second he glimpsed the depths of something like despair in her eyes. Then she sat up and composed herself.
‘Sorry for turning up unannounced,’ he began, but she was already on her feet and moving past him, leaving another, stronger trail of perfume behind her.
‘An apology only counts if it is sincere.’
‘Why would you doubt my sincerity?’
He watched her moving about the lab, gathering up her things, getting ready to leave. She spoke over her shoulder:
‘You came here for information.’
Makana reached for his cigarettes and considered offering them, but Doctora Siham even had that covered. She produced a gold packet of Benson and Hedges from her lab coat. Makana struck a match and held it towards her like a peace offering, mildly surprised when she didn’t shy away.
‘You are interested in knowing whether I have made any progress with your severed head and if there is a connection with the car-crash victims.’ She blew smoke briskly into the air and looked him in the eye. ‘You don’t need to apologise for seeking answers.’
An adequate response was not forthcoming. Hopelessly, Makana gestured towards the darkened office. ‘I didn’t mean to intrude.’
‘Your friendly Inspector called to ask me to be accommodating. He wants me to keep you informed on an informal basis. Congratulations, you’re moving up in the world.’
‘It’s a temporary arrangement.’
‘But you’re working for the police now.’ Doctora Siham arched an eyebrow. ‘Doesn’t that compromise your independence?’
‘I don’t answer to Okasha.’
‘Well, be that as it may, officially you have no right to be here. I would be quite justified in calling security to show you out.’
‘But you’re not going to do that.’
She shook her head. ‘Let me be clear, my interest in this case is motivated by injustice. The police are going to do little to find out who murdered these young men.’
‘We can agree on that.’
‘I assume that’s why Okasha is involving you.’
‘Okasha is a policeman at the end of the day. He knows that he has no backing to follow a case like this.’
‘So what is your motivation? Do you think finding out who killed these boys will compensate for centuries of slavery and general abuse?’
Makana sighed. On the wall behind her was a poster from the Egyptian Museum: a scene taken from one of the wall paintings from a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. In it, Anubis, the jackal-headed god, was bowed over a corpse, attending to the embalming process.
‘I’m not sure we should read too much into my motives. At the moment I’m interested to know if there is any connection between the brutal murder and dismemberment of a young man who turned up on my doorstep and the body found in the back of the van.’
‘Fair enough.’ Doctora Siham stubbed out her cigarette in the big aluminium ashtray. She moved off, melting into the shadows at the far end of the room where the refrigerated lockers stood. With a high buzz a single bar of neon fluttered into life. It flickered a couple of times and then grew steady. The other lights remained dark. The pathologist pulled open a battered steel door, the handle hanging lopsidedly in its socket. A single stretcher stood inside the tiled chamber. She pulled this out halfway, and Makana stepped closer as she drew back the white sheet.
‘Okay, so we have two bodies of young men found within days of one another. Coincidence? Perhaps not. Rough estimates of the number of Southern Sudanese living in this city vary but could easily be counted in tens of thousands, perhaps even hundreds of thousands. Two dead in two days is not remarkable.’
‘It’s the manner in which they died that concerns me.’
‘Agreed.’ She allowed herself a fleeting smile. He couldn’t help thinking that her mind was elsewhere. In that brief moment when he had caught sight of her sitting alone in her office, she had appeared to be crying.
‘Let’s begin with the most recent. The young man who turned up in the locker of the van.’
‘Was he dead before the accident?’
‘It appears so. Body temperature would put the moment of death at between twenty and thirty hours before the accident. Rigor mortis had already worn off but decay of the internal organs had barely begun.’
The dead man seemed to hover between them like an absent friend. Makana looked down at the face and wondered who he was and what his life had been that it should lead him to such an end.
‘He didn’t die in the accident, you say. So how did he die?’
‘A heart attack.’ Doctora Siham scanned his face for a reaction, but Makana said nothing. ‘I’m still waiting for some tests to come back, but from my preliminary examination I’m pretty sure that’s what happened.’
‘Isn’t he a bit young for that?’ Despite the darkness of his skin, death lent the young man a greyness. One eye was half shut, the mouth slack. He looked as though he had been strong and sure of himself in life. Now he was a nameless cadaver in a refrigerated vault. No afterlives, no second chances. No sign of Anubis either.
‘A birth defect. Something in his heart that he probably didn’t even know about.’ She clicked her fingers. ‘One day it goes off and that’s it.’
‘How rare is something like that?’
‘Rare, but not unknown.’
‘So he dropped dead at an inconvenient moment and someone decided to get rid of him by driving him out into the desert somewhere, only fate intervened and there was an accident.’
‘Case solved. We can all go back to our lives?’ She looked at him for a moment and then gave a sigh. ‘No, I somehow didn’t think so.’
‘Did you find any signs of sexual activity?’
‘No contusions or torn tissue to indicate he was violated. No traces of fluids of any kind to indicate sexual activity, no semen for example, although it’s possible that it might have been removed.’
‘Removed, how?’
‘He was clean, scrubbed all over with an iodine-based antiseptic solution. I suppose the question is why go to all that trouble.’
A cleanly scrubbed corpse was a novelty in this day and age.
‘I suppose it all depends on where he was when heart failure occurred.’ Makana lit another cigarette. The smell of iodine and other chemicals coming off the body in front of him was seeping through his nostrils, through his pores, into his skin. The hint of perfume he had detected earlier was no longer anything but a faint memory.
‘What else can you tell me about him?’
Doctora Siham gave a light shrug. She readjusted the sheet around the dead man’s shoulders.
‘Young, still in his teens. Bone structure is not fully developed. The marks on the forehead indicate he was a Dinka, more accurately from the area of Bor.’
‘I’m impressed. You’re sure of that?’
‘I told you about my friend Professor Asfour?’
‘The anthropologist.’
‘Perhaps you’d like to talk to him yourself? It might help. You never know.’
Makana nodded his consent.
‘Good. I’ll arrange for you to meet hi
m. How about tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow is fine.’
There was a brusqueness to her this evening that suggested she had other things on her mind. She pulled the sheet back, replacing it over the face before wheeling the stretcher back into place. The door took a few tries before the latch held. Makana followed her back into the main area of the lab.
‘It still makes no sense. If he died of natural causes, why go to all the trouble of cleaning up the body and then driving it out of town?’
‘Perhaps he died in an inconvenient place.’ Doctora Siham lit another cigarette. ‘They had no plan. The young man dies. They clean him up to get rid of the evidence and then they decide to get rid of the body.’
‘Could this heart defect be provoked by some kind of ill-treatment, or even a shock? Would that show up in the tests?’
‘Possibly.’
‘So it could be induced?’
‘Possibly, if he was under stress of some kind.’
‘And the body showed no signs of torture, physical abuse of any kind?’
Doctora Siham shook her head. ‘Nothing that would suggest torture. Of course, it wouldn’t need to be physical necessarily. Fear could do it.’
‘He could have been scared to death?’
‘Anybody can be scared to death. It just takes the right situation.’ She smiled, but he wasn’t sure what exactly it was that amused her. There was something strange and detached about the pathologist, he decided. He wondered why he had never noticed this before. In the past Makana had speculated just how old she might be. She dressed like an older woman. A precaution, no doubt. In an environment dominated by police officers and lawyers, being often in the public eye, it was no doubt imperative that she play down her femininity, which explained the heavy trousers, long jackets, lab coats and the drab headscarf she wore when she went out on call. She held this in her hands now, delaying the moment when she would don it again. She didn’t seem too bothered about being seen by him without it. What did that mean exactly?
‘If I were you . . .’ she said. She was moving around the room, tidying things away, preparing to leave. ‘… And I’m not trying to tell you how to do your job, I would look at how he got into that van. Where were they taking him from, where to and why?’ She hesitated again and looked up. ‘But you’re already working on that, right?’
‘Among other things. Is there anything to link the two deaths?’
‘There’s quite a gap between heart failure and decapitation, don’t you think?’
‘Sure, but maybe they simply didn’t get that far. Maybe he died before they could get started.’
She frowned. ‘You’re talking about a ritual of some kind? Witch doctors, something like that?’
‘I was just thinking out loud.’
Before she could respond the door to the corridor creaked open and a heavy-set man holding a flashlight appeared.
‘Ah, it’s you, ya doctora.’ He squinted at Makana as he spoke, as if trying to assess what exactly his game was. ‘I was just locking up.’
‘That’s fine, Ahmed, we were just leaving.’
With a sense of propriety, and more than a touch of general nosiness, the nightwatchman remained in the doorway waiting for the doctor to finish gathering up her things. When they came out he followed along behind, his scuffed shoes scraping down the long corridor. Now that they were no longer alone, a certain formality had crept into their conversation.
‘I can get you photographs of the victims. That might help your investigation.’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘She’s a good person.’ The nightwatchman lingered after the doctor had driven off. Makana was lost in his thoughts, thinking vaguely that he needed to find a taxi to take him home. The air was strangely warm and the sky heavy with clouds, their swollen undersides softened by the halogen glow of streetlights. In the distance the never-ending rumble of an inland sea was the sound of late-night traffic, beeping and grunting, sighing over the high arc of an overpass. Makana sensed in the nightwatchman an old-fashioned scandalmonger looking for an audience.
‘She works too much, teaching and running the laboratory.’
‘What happened to her husband?’
‘He’s gone. He got sick and died. Something like that. She’s still a handsome woman. She should marry again, have children.’
Makana couldn’t quite see it, but murmured his assent to confirm his place in the fraternity of men everywhere, in whose interests it was that all women should be safely held in the institution of marriage.
‘I’m surprised she was working tonight. I thought she was going out with her colleague.’
‘Professor Asfour?’
‘That’s the one.’
The watchman seemed to have taken it upon himself to walk him to the front gate. The prospect of a long night alone probably encouraged talkativeness. Makana was inclined to speed up the pace a little, but he was curious.
‘Maybe she’s found a possible suitor in this Professor Asfour?’
‘That’s none of my business, but he’s not her type, if you ask me.’
Makana found himself wondering what Doctora Siham’s type might be. He should have asked Ahmed, who seemed to know everything about her, but he didn’t want to encourage him, or appear too interested. He wondered if this business with Professor Asfour explained her sadness earlier, when he had seen her alone. At the gate, Makana thanked the nightwatchman for his help and took himself off before he was snared by another long story.
Chapter Sixteen
Makana opened his eyes to the sound of raindrops pattering lightly on the roof. It had been there all night, he realised, gently drumming away at his thoughts. Perhaps it was a consequence of visiting the morgue last thing at night. Somehow the image of the dead young man pulled from the twisted wreckage had remained lodged in his mind’s eye. How young he had seemed, laid out on that stretcher. No more than a child. He was unable to shake off the terrible sense of how peaceful he had looked.
He climbed out of bed to gaze at the river’s surface. Overnight it had become a confused puzzle of geometry and light. The city seemed to heave a deep sigh of relief when rain came, as if it were still a blessing from heaven when in fact it caused all kinds of chaos. Tyres worn smooth as silk didn’t adhere too well to wet roads. Windscreen wipers that had long forgotten they had a purpose whined in protest as they dragged themselves back and forth across scratched windscreens. Drains revealed themselves to have been blocked for ages, potholes dissolved into bottomless wells. Roads sank without trace, and everywhere people were to be seen hopping and skipping to avoid muddy shoes and wet trousers.
Aziza came running up the stairs bearing the morning papers on her head, a child again, laughing with excitement. Bare feet didn’t mind the mud.
‘I love it when it rains,’ she said excitedly. ‘It’s like the whole world’s on holiday!’
Makana took the papers from her and glanced through them while she made tea on the small petrol stove. He was quite capable of making his own tea, but Aziza had taken it upon herself as one of her duties as his unofficial assistant and it seemed cruel to deny her the pleasure.
The state-run papers were thick with words of praise from the American leader. President Bush was quoted at length on the subject of freedom in the world. Egypt was singled out as ‘a great and proud nation’, lighting the road towards peace in the Middle East. It would show the way towards democracy in the Middle East. It was a spirited defence of President Mubarak, their staunchest ally in the region, apart from Israel.
‘How does one become a doctor?’ Aziza asked as she tended the kettle.
‘A doctor?’
‘Ya mualim, isn’t that what I just said?’
‘I’m sorry, I have trouble keeping track of your plans. Didn’t you tell me you were thinking of dropping out of school?’
‘That’s my mother talking. She thinks learning is not something for girls.’
‘But where did the idea of beco
ming a doctor come from?’
‘Well, remember the lady who was here the other day, the one who took that head?’
Makana put down the paper he was trying to read.
‘What about her?’
‘Didn’t you see how everyone was looking at her?’ Aziz grew wistful. Makana considered her. Why not? Why shouldn’t she become a doctor? She was probably as smart as anyone.
‘You have to study, I mean for many years.’
‘I don’t have a problem with that. Do I have to pay?’
‘No.’ Better, he thought, to spare her the truth just yet. In theory the education was free, but the sheer number of students meant that you were condemned to attending pointless lectures in enormous, overcrowded auditoriums. Unless you could afford private lessons you had no chance of scoring high enough to graduate. Still, as a plan it showed initiative and ambition. Makana couldn’t fault her for that. Naturally, her mother would not appreciate his encouraging such thoughts. She already saw Makana as a bad influence, and the girl was getting older. At Umm Ali’s insistence a bell had been recently installed, an old-fashioned brass maritime thing with a knocker that hung on the lower deck of the awama. In Umm Ali’s view it was unfitting for a girl of her age to go charging into a man’s living quarters without warning. Not that it gave Makana much notice. Aziza moved so fast he barely had time to register the sound before she was standing in front of him.
‘You’re as smart as any of them, Aziza. If you set your mind to it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t make it.’
‘My mother would never let me go to university.’
‘Why not? You’ll be able to take care of her. She won’t have to work in the garden and all that, when she’s old.’
‘She’s already old,’ Aziza grinned. ‘But she’d kill me if she heard me say that.’
‘Then we’d better not tell her.’
Aziza brought the tea over, still brimming with excitement. He couldn’t help thinking she was only a couple of years youngers than Nasra would be now. ‘She was just so cool. You could see how all the men listened to her.’