by Parker Bilal
The stairs were bare concrete. Hardly any light penetrated this far into the stairwell and he had to proceed by feel, edging down step by step. The air grew warmer, a thick, heady mixture that felt asphyxiating. He groped his way forward, hands outstretched until he reached the wall. The door was in the same position as the one above. It was unlocked. He stepped out, sensing cooler air, and open space expanding around him as he moved away from the stairwell.
Down here it was even darker than the floor above. Without the ramp there was nothing to let light in. Still he groped on, his hands extended in front of him until he bumped into something, a high wire fence that seemed to stretch away along the ground. He stood still, his eyes adjusting. Ahead of him, just beyond the fence, he became aware of movement. Something slipping through the dark, just out of reach. Something glinted in the darkness. A bright opening and closing. The animal smell of damp straw. With one hand to the fence, he moved along.
Out of the darkness shadows surged towards him. Something thumped into the fence next to him, knocking him back with a jolt. Makana pulled away. He knew what the movement was. Dogs. How many he couldn’t tell. They were loping along beside him, leaping over one another, snarling. Their smell was overpowering, a thick, heady, bestial reek. They were quiet, too. Unlike the dogs Makana had seen upstairs, these animals had a keen pack instinct. They moved together like a unit, brushing up against the fence, just enough to make the links jangle, before melting back into the shadows. He glimpsed their eyes, brief yellow flares that blinked out almost at once. He sensed their constant motion and their hunger.
Careful not to get too close, Makana followed the fence along to the far corner where it met a concrete pillar. A crack of light drew his attention to the right. Someone was moving, low down, close to the floor, a torch beam illuminating a spot on the floor. Stepping quietly, he made his way over. The tiny flickers of light guiding his steps.
‘Hello, Mustafa.’
The man gave a cry and scrabbled backwards, crashing into a stack of cardboard boxes.
‘It’s all right,’ Makana said. ‘I’m not here to hurt you.’
Mustafa Alwan was not in good shape. Dirty bandages were wrapped around one arm which he held close to his chest at an odd angle. There was a scarf tied around his head and right eye. His face showed lacerations.
‘Who are you? What do you want?’
‘I want to talk, that’s all.’ Makana held up his hands to reassure him. ‘It’s okay.’
After a moment or two the fight went out of Alwan, not so much relenting as collapsing with exhaustion. Makana crouched down in front of him. Alwan stared at him out of his one good eye.
‘You should see a doctor.’
Alwan shook his head. ‘No doctor.’
‘Have you been hiding down here since the accident?’
‘Not an accident.’ He was huddled in a corner of the narrow alcove, hidden behind stacks of dusty boxes and old furniture – a desk with a broken leg, a tangle of cracked chairs. A grubby blanket had been hung from a piece of clothes line strung between two pillars. The torch lay on the floor where he had dropped it, the pencil of light stretching across the ground between them. Makana jerked his head.
‘The dogs out there, are those Abu Gomaa’s?’
‘He breeds them. Crazy old man. Dogs and jackals. He bets money on fights.’
‘He’s helping you.’
Alwan squinted at him. ‘You’re the one who’s been asking questions.’
‘He told you about that?’
‘He said he’d got rid of you.’
‘I came back.’ Makana was curious. ‘There was a forensic team here. Upstairs. They didn’t come down here?’
‘He closed off the door, told them it was a storage area, that nobody ever came down here.’
So much for thorough police work. Makana eased himself down to sit on the floor. He offered his cigarettes. There was a bad smell down here. Was it the dogs or Alwan? Between them, the place stank.
‘You said it wasn’t an accident.’
‘They ran us off the road. They wanted to kill me.’
‘Who wanted to kill you?’
‘They hit us from the side, rammed us right across into the other lane. A tanker was coming. Of course they wanted to kill us. It wasn’t an accident.’
‘You saw who did it?’
‘I saw.’ Alwan cupped his cigarette and stared at the floor. For a moment his mind seemed to drift away. Perhaps the blow to the head had done serious damage. He looked up. ‘You came here alone?’
Makana nodded. ‘I spoke to your wife.’
‘My wife?’ Alwan’s face crumpled. ‘My family. You saw them. They’re all right?’
Makana recalled the wife’s confident assertion that her husband was away on business.
‘She thinks you’re away working. She doesn’t know you’re here?’
‘She doesn’t know anything. It’s better that way.’
‘Tell me about your son.’
‘What about him?’
‘He’s ill, I understand.’
‘He’s dying,’ Mustafa Alwan said quietly. ‘He needs an operation. Qaddus promised me, but then there were delays, always delays. He wanted money, he said. Then he wanted me to drive for him, clear up his mess.’ His gaze came up to find Makana. ‘And every day I would watch that boy growing weaker. It was too much.’ His eyes flickered away. ‘I told them that if they didn’t save my boy they would be reading about their precious institute in the papers.’
‘And that’s when they decided to get rid of you.’
Mustafa Alwan nodded glumly. ‘I wouldn’t have done it. Well, I don’t know. He’s my boy. You know, a man will do anything to save the life of his own child.’ Alwan tensed. He held up a hand, dropping his voice to a whisper. ‘Did you hear that?’
Makana listened. ‘The dogs, maybe. What was the story you were going to tell?’
Alwan shook his head, motioning him to be silent. ‘You must go now.’ He reached for the torch and clicked it off. They were plunged into darkness. ‘Go!’ he hissed before scrabbling away into the shadows. Getting to his feet, Makana stepped back out of the alcove. He stopped to listen. He could still only hear the muffled sound of the dogs pattering about, whining softly, rubbing up against one another, brushing the fence. He could feel their presence like a wall of suppressed fury, a storm about to break. Makana moved along, tracing his way back along the fence towards the stairwell. He was almost there when a light clicked on and a powerful torch shone into his face.
‘You really don’t learn, do you?’
It took Makana a moment to place the voice. By then it was too late. He opened his mouth to speak, only for the air to be knocked out of his lungs. The heavy punch caught him in the solar plexus. He felt his knees give way as he folded in half. He retched drily as his face was pressed into the ground, where the smell of dogs and straw was overwhelming. A boot ground into the back of his neck. Hakim, Karim, he wasn’t sure which one of them was on the other end of the boot. From somewhere behind him he heard Alwan scream as he was dragged out of his hiding place.
‘No, no. No!’
Makana was hauled to his feet. His stomach hurt and he was fighting the urge to throw up. He was shoved back against the wire fence and held there by a hand to his throat. The torch was beamed into his eyes again. He knocked the hand away only to receive another blow to the head with the end of the heavy torch. He swayed and almost fell. This time he saw stars.
‘Just be patient.’ Hakim, the large one, loomed close, his breath rich with garlic and alcohol. ‘Your turn is coming. First you get to watch.’ He swung the beam of the torch down along the fence to where Makana could see Mustafa Alwan on his knees. Karim was kicking him methodically in the ribs, interspersing this with some hefty blows to the head. He seemed to be taking his time, trying to soften him up. Alwan had his fingers locked through the links of the fence, trying to hold on. He soon regretted it. The dogs came in a rush of fu
r, pummelling the fence in their haste. Small and powerful, they went for his fingers. Alwan howled and in a flash of light Makana saw him pull his hand back, clutching the bloody stump where two of his fingers had been. Next to him, Makana heard Hakim chuckle while Karim broke off from the beating to grab Alwan by the collar and drag him along the floor. Hakim pushed Makana along in the same direction.
‘Come on, move. You don’t want to miss this.’
They reached the pillar at the far end, Makana doing his best to keep away from the fence. On the other side he could hear the snarling as the dogs grew more frantic. The torch beam darted about as they moved. Ahead of him, Makana could see Alwan trying to resist being pulled further, only to receive a punch in the face which dampened his resistance. He was dragged on his back along the floor to a point halfway along, where Karim dropped him in a heap. Hakim aimed the light at the fence where a makeshift gate was held shut by a twisted metal coat hanger.
‘Crazy old man and his dogs, right?’ Hakim said. ‘He never knew how useful they were going to be.’
‘You fed them Jonah’s remains.’
‘Jonah?’
‘The brother and sister. The ones you held in the room upstairs.’
‘The ones who escaped? They were a pain, running off like that. Sure, we gave the dogs a few pieces, as a treat. The rest we used to scare those kids off. They were getting in the way. We showed them, though, eh?’ Hakim broke off and slapped Makana around the head.
‘Why cut him to pieces?’
‘That wasn’t me.’ Hakim nodded towards his companion. ‘He gets carried away sometimes. He didn’t like having to chase that crazy abeed and his sister across town. Both of them out of their minds. That’s tiresome, and for what?’
‘Where is she now?’
‘Where is who?’
‘Beatrice?’
‘That’s what you’re going to tell me, right?’ Hakim smiled. ‘No, wait till you see the main event. You’ll talk then.’
Ahead of them, Alwan had rolled over and was very slowly trying to crawl away, leaving a glistening trail of blood on the ground behind him. Ahead of him was a mound of bloody rags that Makana made out as the old man Abu Gomaa.
‘He shouldn’t have tried to hide Alwan from us.’ Hakim tutted in dismay. ‘That’s really not fair, we’re supposed to be on the same side, after all.’
‘Alwan and Abu Gomaa were working together.’
‘Amateurs, ripping off that fool Shaddad who doesn’t know the time of day unless you tell him.’
Up ahead, Karim gave the gate a kick, forcing the dogs back, then with a growl of irritation he turned back to Alwan, who cried out, clinging onto Abu Gomaa’s lifeless body. At first Karim tried to just haul him off, but then he tired of tugging at two of them and bent down to prise Alwan loose. This was a mistake. He gave a shout and staggered back. Next to him, Makana heard Hakim swear. The torch beam picked out blood streaming down Karim’s white shirt.
‘Son of a bitch!’
Hakim went straight for Alwan, who was trembling on the floor, frozen in place by his own actions, awaiting the inevitable. Hakim laid into him, hitting him hard. Makana knew it was now or never. Karim had staggered back and was slumped against the wire fence, his hands around the hilt of the knife that was buried in his side. Alwan must have known that Abu Gomaa carried a knife and decided to use it.
Mustafa Alwan was unconscious. His face was a bloody pulp but he seemed to be breathing. Makana went over and dragged the gate shut. The dogs were still busy but he didn’t want to risk any of them getting out. The bloody mass of ripped clothes and torn flesh told him there was nothing he could do for Karim.
Upstairs he found a signal for his phone and called Okasha, who wasn’t happy to be woken up but paid attention quickly when Makana told him what was going on. There was one more surprise still to come. When he came back downstairs he found that Hakim had disappeared.
Chapter Thirty-four
It took what remained of the night to deal with the aftermath. By the time Makana made his way back up the ramp towards the world, the birds were singing in the trees and daylight was breaking overhead. He only remembered his appointment with Sindbad when his telephone began to ring.
‘Ya basha, I’m here, as we agreed, but where are you?’
He could sleep in the car, he thought, which was fine in principle, except that with Sami in the back seat chattering away, sleep became a form of torture. Although by the sound of things Sami himself had not had a comfortable night.
‘The bed is really just a few beer crates with a very thin mattress over them. It’s like lying on stones. No matter which way you turn something finds one of your bones.’
Makana refrained from reply. His mind was on the events of the previous night. Okasha had not been happy to discover what awaited him in Shaddad’s basement. It was a mess. Two dead and one of them a police officer. Mustafa Alwan was driven away comatose. The paramedics were worried that he might have suffered lasting brain damage from the accident and the beating he had taken. They had to call in a team of specialists to deal with the dogs, who were in a frenzy.
‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ said the vet who took charge of the operation. ‘They’re less dogs than jackals.’ They sedated the animals with drugged meat and then took them off to the zoo for observation. This allowed the medics to get close to Karim’s body, or what was left of it. He had been torn to shreds and was unrecognisable. Part of a bloody identity card was retrieved which confirmed that he was a police officer from Giza district. Okasha was reluctant to lay the blame at the feet of fellow officers. He tried to turn the story on its head to explain their presence in the basement.
‘Maybe they were here doing their job, investigating.’
‘Is that what you really think?’ Makana asked. ‘Or is that what you’d like to think?’
‘Who knows. One of them got himself killed and the other disappeared.’
‘You’re saying you don’t believe me?’
‘Look at it from my position. How am I supposed to report this? Two officers murder an old bawab and almost murder a driver. What’s the explanation for that kind of behaviour?’ He held up a hand to silence Makana’s protests. ‘You go away, you think it over, and you come in tomorrow and make an official statement.’ He turned away before Makana could say more. It had been a long night and he was tired. ‘And I don’t need to tell you that you can’t leave town.’
Which, of course, was exactly what he was doing right now. The warm air from the desert blew in through the open window, making the previous night feel like a nightmare he had just woken from. When he decided that Qaddus was just stringing him along, Mustafa Alwan had contacted a journalist and threatened to go public about the Hesira Institute. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have gone through with it. Threatening to go to the press was just his way of trying to call their bluff. All he wanted was to find a cure for his son – understandable under the circumstances – but Hakim and Karim weren’t the kind of people to take a threat lightly, so they dealt with him in their customary way. It was two different levels of the same game, and everything seemed to go back to the Hesira Institute.
What wasn’t yet clear to him was the question of Beatrice and Jonah. Clearly they hadn’t made it to America. They had wound up in Shaddad’s basement room. One of them, Jonah, had been bleeding. He had helped his sister climb up through the hatch and get away. Where had she gone?
Jonah’s fate was lamentably clear. He had been murdered and cut to pieces, his feet fed to the dogs and his head thrown into the river. The other pieces of his body had been arranged as a macabre display in the old palace, as a warning to Mourad and his friends. They’d been stepping on somebody’s toes. How? Most likely through sheltering Beatrice. They had taken her onto their freedom train, possibly at Estrella’s request. There were still a lot of questions, but Makana hoped that some of the answers would be found out here in the Sinai, at Hasna.
There was
little traffic at this early hour, and once they got out past the city the roads were almost empty. It was a warm day, which made a pleasant change, and the bright light reflecting off the sand made it feel as if winter had turned a corner. Optimistic, he knew, but over the past few weeks the awama had been cold, dank and creaking with discontent. He didn’t think he could take much more of that.
The warmth brought back other memories: his dinner with Jehan. He found himself drumming his fingers on the roof of the car. It was something of a surprise to him that the evening hadn’t been as awkward as he had feared. She too appeared to have enjoyed herself. All of this felt alien, and at the back of his mind there was the sense that he was going against his nature, that being in the company of another woman was, in some strange, unfathomable way, being unfaithful to Muna.
His fingers ceased their drumming and with a sigh he straightened up in his seat. He checked the roadmap that was folded on the seat beside him and looked at his watch. They were making good time. There was no guarantee that they would find Mourad, but it did make sense that he might be there. Assuming that he was still alive, then this might be far enough away for him to feel safe.
Out of the barren landscape a roadsign loomed up far ahead. Five minutes later they were turning towards the north-east. In the distance soft hillsides of sand were like pencil lines scratched across the flat grey landscape. Gradually the square outline of buildings emerged, simple houses set low against the surrounding starkness. The town was quiet, hardly any movement worth reporting. A horse-drawn wooden cart trotted ahead of them, bearing a washing machine on which a little boy was perched. His eyes followed them as the car went by. They passed a row of shops selling machine parts, hardware, aluminium windows and doors. A small supermarket, a post office, clusters of yellow brooms, orange bedsheets, metal rakes, a water-pump specialist.