Jalila smiled politely at the waiter, who was immediately apologetic. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not criticising. No, no. I’m no expert. I just spend a lot of time watching people.’ He motioned to his customers, who were playing on their phones, or transfixed by the muted tragedy on TV. ‘People like to watch videos of cats doing silly things or they like disaster. That guy by the bar has been watching this kidnap on TV for an hour. This is the competition.’
Aiya and Jalila looked up to the screen, quickly piecing together their own story from the images of hostage, kidnapper and concerned company executives. Both instinctively understood the story’s dark, addictive qualities.
‘You know what I’m thinking?’ said the waiter. ‘If you really want people to pay attention, you should kidnap one of those silly cats.’ He laughed out loud. ‘People will love it. Nothing like cute mystery to bring everybody together. No?’
Still chuckling, he nodded an apology as he moved away to serve another customer.
They shrugged at each other. ‘Fancy kidnapping a cat, Mum?’
Jalila smiled distantly, staring thoughtfully out the window. Aiya stirred her chocolate. The waiter’s words had stirred something, but neither of them was thinking about cats.
The Hit List
At the first sign of dusk, Al-Shā’ir would make his way up to Aliah’s grave, and take a seat. There, as the sun called a truce with the landscape, he told her the story of his day. It would always begin with anecdotes from the stage, or a piece of gossip involving one of Aliah’s old friends. But this was all a prelude to what burned in his heart, words that only a woman who loved him for all his faults could understand; for every night, he would tell the story of a mother and daughter who left their home in a quest to save the world.
These stories were the most dangerous he had ever told. Worlds of genies and fantastical kingdoms were replaced with harsh dystopias filled with apartment blocks, traffic and poverty: he’d left a world he knew for one he did not. Their adventure was the only consolation remaining to him.
The antagonists were the most complex he had conceived; situations were no longer black and white, right or wrong. Evil was now replaced by background noise and apathy; the landscapes of their quests were no longer haunted forests and howling seas, but concepts and systems. It was never obvious to Al-Shā’ir if his stories were sad, thrilling, or comic. Yet it brought him great happiness to be close to them: the ghosts of his family, both dead and alive, united by a story once more.
But as the sun fell, the warmth of his stories diluted in the darkness, leaving him lonely and broken, in the knowledge that he had imagined the lives of his family too much, and taken part in them too little. And he wasn’t now sure where to start.
Jalila had written: their European tour had come to an end, and they were headed for Cairo. Their purpose was vague, speaking of new creative ways of attracting a local audience. Their sole request was for a list – compiled by the Grand Circus every quarter, using information drawn from their global initiates – of powerful or influential figures who were to visit Cairo.
Had he not already tried and failed upon a public stage? Influence could not be won or lobbied for The Order’s cause when no one was listening. No special pleading would change that, and he doubted they would be granted meetings with the elite in any case. But he decided that maybe they too needed to sample that bitter experience for themselves.
So every three months he would be handed a list to glance over before it was placed in an envelope and wax sealed with the rababah insignia. It was five o’clock one afternoon as the list was placed in his hand. He skimmed the surnames: Johnson, Evans, Meyer, Sellwood, Darwish, Riaz, Pounder, Reichwein, Dwyer, Wilson; and browsed the professions: human rights campaigner, educator, programmes director, composer, anthropologist, comedian, philanthropist (former oil company CEO), global health adviser, academic, explorer, accompanied by columns indicating their date of arrival, accommodation in Cairo, and rough itineraries. He shrugged and nodded to the assistant.
He rested a while in thought, before he got up and departed for his daily pilgrimage to a grave where the last remaining light suspended, if only briefly, his heartbreak with the world.
A Parable
15 years earlier
The inaugural Festival of Good, Oxfordshire, UK
It was day three of the Festival of Good. The English summer had arrived. Participants modelled summer dresses and shirts with undone buttons. While there were displays of community projects in India and photo exhibitions of famine in Africa, the atmosphere, with its strawberries and cocktails, was closer to that of a wedding reception, as a collection of the world’s most prominent well-intentioned people milled around the marquee village.
Over the last two days they had been treated to presentations by activists, philanthropists and alternative currency economists. It was widely agreed that the high spot of the festival so far had been a charismatic speech by Richard Pounder, the new, young CEO of GoldBlue Oil who had set out his vision of a green oil industry. In the question and answer session that followed, he had been challenged by Liam Powell, a young journalist, who accused him of representing not genuine change, but a public relations exercise. This was compounded by a further challenge from the floor by a controversial NGO worker, Jordie Macpherson, who had wagered Pounder 50 quid that his principles wouldn’t last as long as his employment at GoldBlue – that his principles had a price.
The same Jordie Macpherson had earlier shocked the crowd with his highly individual take on his reasons for leaving the World Bank and joining an organisation that worked in slum communities around the world: ‘I’ve no idea what the fuck I was doing at the World Bank. It reminds me of when I was a virgin, I tried to get my hand down this girl’s pants, but was so nervous I forgot about the belt. I ended up with my hand trapped, wiggling about trying to look busy. The girl was polite enough to give a half-hearted groan, but whatever . . . it was a pretty fucking terrible experience for all concerned. At the World Bank, the girl was a country, and the knickers, its economy.’
Sixteen-year-old Miller Carey was sitting in the front row with his mum.
It was a performance session, mid-morning, on day three. The lights were turned down. A man and two women entered the stage. The women went straight behind a four-foot-high screen on the stage. The man stood to the side. He was wearing a white shirt that came all the way down to his ankles. The women spent a few moments organising hidden objects behind the screen.
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls. The man’s face conveyed many qualities: warmth and secrecy, humour and sadness.
I trust you are comfortable, as we have a story to tell that is, and is not, so.
Once upon a time there was a king. A puppet appeared in front of the screen, adorned with fanciful lace clothing and crown. The king was a mild ruler, not like some of these beasts we hear of in fairy tales with a taste for tomfoolery and murder. He had a deep respect for the needs of his subjects, and acknowledged that his responsibility lay in preparing his people for the coming of democracy. When they were ready, he would step aside.
In the meantime, the king’s court ruled justly over its population. Proposed legislature had to be performed; puppeteers, dancers, soothsayers and drunkards were all granted a stage before the king and his advisers. The public filled the court’s stalls to the rafters.
The marquee was transfixed. They had lost count of all the intricately crafted puppets that had entered the stage; their bodies were directed with grace and humour.
No policy was put forward until its supporters had transformed it into the lyrics of a 12-bar hoedown. Budgets were turned down for lacking a sense of rhythm, court expenses due to a lazy half rhyme.
The crowd laughed as the kingdom’s absurdity unfurled.
Referendums took the form of two plays that had been inspired from each of the competing points of view, and performed in a random town. Whichever play entertained the crowd the most gained
legislative approval.
No bills were ratified until the whole court had made love to their partners.
A queen puppet approached the king. Just as the queen pushed the gown off her shoulder, a curtain quickly fell, and the audience clapped with delight.
One day, a regal notice arrived, written by a baron from faraway lands wanting to visit and pay his respects. Before he arrived, an adviser stole the ear of the king, and confessed his fears that this baron might look down on the current practices of the court. ‘Your Highness, I believe that abroad, governing is not considered a form of play.’
The king looked confused. ‘Then . . . how on earth do they govern?’
‘I believe they do so . . .’ – the adviser paused nervously – ‘. . . seriously.’
The king’s confusion was complete.
‘In the name of kingdom security,’ the adviser continued, ‘we can’t afford our particular mannerisms to be common knowledge.’
The king remained unmoved. ‘Ah, yes . . . yes of course,’ he suddenly exclaimed, realising his adviser’s euphemism. ‘Well, what on earth are we to do?’
For the next hour, the adviser tried to explain how kingdoms abroad were governed: their respected rituals, how participants felt the gravity of it all.
Eventually the king relented. Unable to comprehend what was being asked of him, he gave full authority to his advisers to manage this one-off event.
Once the king departed, the advisers called in the court fool.
‘Where’s my master?’ asked the fool. It was he who ran court sessions, and whose responsibility it was to maintain a healthy level of reverie.
‘We’re in charge for now,’ said one of the advisers, ‘and we’ve decided it’s best for the kingdom if you don’t come to court this week.’
‘You boorish cockscombs. You could never run court without me.’
‘A foreign baron is attending, and the king thinks your presence would embarrass the kingdom,’ one of the advisers sneered.
The fool laughed. ‘I know my master better than that. This all comes from you, and your desires to run this kingdom like all the others. I know what you are.’
‘And what’s that?’ an adviser bit back. ‘A fool?’ The other advisers laughed without humour.
‘No. You’re a . . .’ The fool stared back with a smile, before whispering the following syllables as if they were a curse. ‘Bu. Reau. Crat.’
The puppet fool exited the stage to be replaced by a line of bugle-playing puppets, greeting the baron’s entourage at court, while the Festival of Good’s audience watched, enchanted.
For all the orders and declarations made by the advisers for them to stay away, the public crowded outside waiting to attend the court session. The advisers sent in plain-clothed guards to dispel them.
Inside court were a group of men and women who failed to understand why they had been invited when so many others remained outside: their interests in law, banking and renting land were regarded as the least glamorous in the whole kingdom.
‘You are here because you are the elite,’ said an adviser, before issuing their instructions.
‘The elite?’ they repeated unfamiliarly. ‘Must be French,’ said one.
The elite desperately conferred with each other to try to grasp their new responsibilities. It was all very confusing. Those who in-itiated a Barber’s Quartet welcome to the baron were quickly cut off by the advisers and escorted from court. ‘The excitement of your visit seems to have driven some of our privy council positively mad,’ excused a conniving adviser.
The session passed quietly. Only the advisers spoke, passing legislature, while the rest of the elite sat confused and afraid. But pass it did, and with a sigh of relief the ordeal was over, and things could return to normal.
Except they did not. The baron, tired from his travels, was encouraged by the advisers to stay for a month. Meanwhile the advisers convinced the king that the pretence must continue until the baron’s departure. Palace guards were ordered to keep the protesting fool away from the king.
The public turned up to court once more, not expecting to partici-pate, but as a protest against their exclusion. Guards forcefully scattered the crowd, with veiled threats to any future dissent. Within the court, the elites started to learn their new roles within a wholly different performance – that of raised hands and un-played consensus.
The fool could sense the changing tides. On his walks outside the palace gates he heard the confusion of the people. Mornings heralded new laws nailed to doorways, laws that bore little relationship to their lives, enforced rather than en-acted.
He could be idle no longer. Guards blocked his access to the king’s ear, so under the cover of night, he visited taverns and squares, encouraging the continuation of the kingdom’s traditions in the bawdy underground. The disillusioned came to hear his foolery, playing a clandestine opposition into existence.
The advisers soon learned of the swelling disillusion, although its ringleaders remained unknown. They intimidated people in their homes, demanding information. Plain-clothed guards spied in taverns. Yet the swell of discontent continued.
The advisers met, urgently seeking a solution. ‘It is said that you cannot jail an idea,’ said one. The others were impressed by his profundity, but anxious for his solution. ‘But you can undermine it.’
‘With what?’ came the reply.
The adviser smiled. ‘With fear disguised as reason.’
The following day, notices were found stuck to walls throughout the kingdom. Within its lines there were reports of neighbouring kingdoms preparing for war, of potential hard economic times ahead. Over family dinners, parents started to chastise younger generations for continuing such naïve play when the whole security of the kingdom was at risk. ‘They are lovely ideas, but your sonnets fail to stack up.’
Families and villagers started to argue among themselves. Angry protesters aimed accusations and ridicule at the king: just another tyrant whose promise of democracy had descended into dictatorship.
The king had spent the preceding month entertaining the baron, who turned out to be an insufferable bore. His advisers assured him that the kingdom was happy, and that he should focus only upon the baron until his departure. The realities were kept hidden from him.
Their only challenge remained the fool, who stalked the palace waiting for a chink in security to grant him access to the ear of the king. The advisers ordered the fool to be followed at all times. The fool became careless; security soon followed him to a tavern where he was calling on his supporters for insurrection against the king’s tyranny.
The king was heartbroken as his advisers spoke of the fool’s treachery: of how his anger at not being invited to the royal party welcoming the baron had fuelled his jealousy; of how he had refused to come to see the king in a sustained fit of self-righteousness; of how, like a madman, he had defamed the king to an outraged public.
So play was confined to outside court. It was said the fool died a pauper. Ringworm of the soul, said the make-believe coroner. The advisers closest to the king protected him from all contact with his population. A continuous cycle of meetings and debates were held to distract the king from asking where his citizens had gone. His court reassured him it was being taken care of. ‘Just sign here, Your Majesty.’ And with a flick of his wrist he set his mind at ease.
It wasn’t much fun, he lamented. The king missed a sing-song. Don’t we all?
His population certainly did when they all started starving to death.
No, it wasn’t much fun at all.
PART THREE
The Kidnap
May 6th
Cairo
Liam didn’t believe any of them. He had met people who had been kidnapped before. Irrelevant of how brutal or calm the experience, they all returned with a heightened sense of description: the distantly heard daily cycle of the call to prayer or commuter buses; the focus and attention paid to food; measuring the length of day by shaft
s of light; the coarse texture of the floor. They remembered.
But while obviously being held by the same group, all the hostages he met described different cells. They were served different food. The number of kidnappers varied. They were reluctant to speak about their ordeal, but not seemingly because of the trauma it caused, but almost because they were trying to downplay that anything untoward had happened. The older woman refused even to call it a kidnap. Hanif the storyteller answered his questions with winding narratives of genies and princesses.
Commissioner El Sayed was a policeman, a man who supposedly specialised in details, and yet he had none to give. When asked about the state of the investigation, he looked confused as to what investigation Liam meant. Everyone he spoke to showed little desire to catch the kidnappers.
The hostages didn’t feel like . . . victims. The way the head teacher had proudly shown the school renovations; the way her colleagues and parents interacted with her: not in the fragile way he had seen other hostages treated, but as part celebrity, part heroine.
But for all his suspicions, Liam was wary of accusing them of the conspiracies he suspected: as a last chance of saving his job, it would have been a bold strategy. After walking the morning streets, frustrated by the dead-ends he was facing in both the story and his career, he took a window seat in the corner of a teahouse, and closely observed the passers-by. He imagined each one as a co-conspirator – in what, he didn’t know. The men sitting at tables around him were all suspects. But what were they guilty of? And did he have a right to solve a mystery that its victims didn’t want solved?
His shirt stuck to his clammy body, the fan making little impact on the rising heat. He suddenly felt lost and vulnerable, impotent at solving a foreign puzzle he no longer had the energy or imagination for. In the time it took him to finish his tea, he decided to check out of his hotel and head to the airport. He was done.
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