City of Jackals
Page 33
‘What is it you really came for?’ The deep-set eyes flickered upward, catching her off balance. ‘If you need money, all you have to do is tell me.’ Again the toothy grin. ‘People come to me all the time because they know I will help them.’
‘It’s not money.’
‘No? Something else then?’
Without warning he seized her wrist and held it firmly, almost without effort. She struggled to pull back, but couldn’t move. With ease he tugged up the long sleeve of her blouse, past the elbow. Relentless eyes searched for the telltale tracks. She wriggled helplessly. When he was satisfied, he let go. Liz pulled her arm back, massaging her painful wrist. A segment of tangerine fell from Alice’s mouth as she watched in silence, eyes wide. She crawled on to her mother’s lap.
‘You have no right . . .’ Liz began, struggling to control her voice. It was futile, but he tilted his head understandingly.
‘This is Cairo. Everyone’s business is common knowledge.’ He gestured with a wide sweep of the hand that encompassed their entire surroundings. It was true. Life was lived on the streets here. Hadn’t she once admired the carved wooden mashrabiyya screens over the old windows, and wondered at the veils covering the faces of some of the women on the street, feeling their eyes sear through her flimsy clothes like hot pokers? She understood now this obsession with secrecy, the value of preserving a private space.
‘She’s my daughter,’ Liz whispered hoarsely.
‘But of course.’
‘I want the best for her.’
‘That’s only natural.’ He inclined his head.
Then Liz had managed to make her excuses, pull Alice into her arms and flee. Later that evening there was a knock at the door of the hotel room. It was late; she had been dozing, and rose from the bed half asleep. She opened the door a crack to peer round it. In the hallway stood a young boy, no more than twelve years old. He had a keen intelligent gaze despite his grimy appearance and an ear that was swollen and misshapen. They stared at one another for what felt like hours but was really only a matter of seconds.
‘Yes? What do you want?’ asked Liz.
Without a word he thrust forward an envelope. It was thick and heavy and she turned it over in her hands. There was nothing written on it. No name or address. Nothing. When she looked up the boy was gone.
Alice slept on blissfully, her damp hair stuck to her forehead with perspiration. Liz sat on the bed and opened the envelope. Inside was a bundle of banknotes. Dollars. A lot of them. So many she couldn’t count. She rifled through quickly – fifties, hundreds, tens, twenties, no sense of order to them at all. And there was something else, something that shifted around at the bottom of the envelope. Throwing the money on to the bed, she tipped the rest of the contents out into her hand. A simple twist of paper. Liz stared at it. She knew what it was. She could feel her heart start to beat. It was fear, excitement, or both mixed up together, that coursed through her veins then. She knew what this was. It was what she had come here to get away from. Or had she really? Her first instinct was to throw it away. Don’t even think about it, Liz. Just flush it down the toilet. And with that intention she got up and headed for the bathroom. She locked the door behind her and leaned against it, the wrap clenched between her fingers. All she had to do was take it one day at a time . . . But she was tired. Tired of the pain in her limbs, the dull ache behind her eyes. Tired of sleeplessness and weariness.
Lowering the toilet cover, she sat down and unfolded the wrap. She stared at the contents, feeling her pulse accelerate. She dipped in a finger and touched it to her tongue. Still there was a moment’s hesitation, in which she saw the road to ruin laid out before her in that single brown thread tapering across her hand. Then the despair rolled back over her like a thick carpet of cloud blotting out the sun, and there was no alternative. Kneeling on the floor, she tipped the heroin on to the seat cover and used the edge of the paper to divide it into narrow lines. She rolled the wrap into a tight tube, pushed it into her left nostril and leaned over. It was like sinking into a warm bath. She felt weightless and free, sliding back to the floor and slumping against the wall. Time stopped. Someone cut the safety line and she watched the blue world floating off into the dark void.
When she opened her eyes she realised it was light outside. Her head felt fuzzy and unclear. She struggled to her feet, her eyes going to the empty wrap on the floor beside her. She threw it aside as she wrestled with the door latch. The first thing she noticed was the money lying on the bed where she had left it. The second thing was that Alice was nowhere to be seen.
She checked the windows, the wardrobe, under the bed. Each option offered a fleeting, absurd ray of hope before the inevitable realisation. Then she was running. Along hallways, down stairwells, through the narrow arteries of the bazaar. She ran in disbelief, in shock, numbed, crying the name of her child. Alice. She walked until she was ready to drop. She was lost herself by then, delirious, finding herself reflected back in pieces, divided into strips by shards of mirrored glass, slivers of shiny metal. The men hanging around, leaning in doorways, called out as she went by, again and again, like a game.
‘Hello, welcome!’
‘Where you from?’
A gust of cold air wafted from a dark passage, making the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. She spun round, seized by the strange sensation that somebody was watching her, and found herself staring into the fierce gaze of Anubis the jackal, guardian of the Underworld. Or rather, an ebony carving decorated in gold leaf, of exactly the same height as her.
Alice was hidden somewhere in this nightmare . . . but where? Turning a corner and then another, not stopping, Liz ran left, right, left again. She paused for breath, looking back, only now she was not sure which way she had come. It all looked the same; the stalls, the narrow streets, the vegetable peelings on the ground, the discarded newspapers. Another corner brought her to a shop filled with junk no one would ever want: old rusty copper trays, wooden tables, strange tablets covered with letters that looked like no language she had ever seen before. Clusters of oil lamps dangled from the rafters. Centuries old. The kind a genie might fly out of if you rubbed them. A man shuffled out of the shadows. Liz looked at his wizened face, the wrinkles inscribed like hieroglyphics. Eyes filled with a very old light, in which she seemed to see her fate written. He smiled, revealing a row of stained yellow teeth. She closed her eyes tightly, then opened her mouth and screamed, ‘Alice!’
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
The Golden Scales
Dogstar Rising
The Ghost Runner
The Burning Gates
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Former police inspector Makana receives a call out of the blue and accepts a case for the corrupt owner of a soccer team, setting him on a treacherous course toward an encounter with an enemy from his past.
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It is 2002 and the reverberations of 9/11 are felt around the globe. Makana investigates the possible honor killing of a girl, following her family history to an insular and perilous oasis town.
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A powerful art dealer hires Makana to track down a painting gone missing i
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First published in Great Britain 2016
First U.S. edition 2016
Jamal Mahjoub, 2016
This is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-63286-327-0
ePub: 978-1-63286-328-7
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