There was a hint of unrest in Heykal’s silence, and Soad instinctively picked up on it. She fidgeted on the rope, sighing, anxious for him to come back to her. The music picked up again in the distance, bright and clear in the night.
“Why don’t we go dance,” she finally said. “My father is busy with the governor, he won’t notice a thing. It’s been so long since I’ve danced with you.”
“No, it’s impossible,” said Heykal. “Go back to your father. I’ve got to go to the casino.”
“Will I see you after?”
“I’ll come to the disco—but not for long. I have things to do tonight.”
“I know what you have to do.” She glanced at him with complicity and added a tragic pout.
“Don’t be jealous,” said Heykal, laughing.
“I’m not jealous now. But I warn you, I will be when I’m older.”
“But you’re already old enough,” said Heykal, teasing her. “You’re almost seventeen!”
“Dirty old man!”
She was going to whimper again, but Heykal got up to leave. Soad flung herself at him, slapping him and trying to kiss him at the same time. With consummate skill—and a battery of false promises—he managed to disentangle himself. Then he crossed the promenade and turned left, toward the casino.
It was a stucco building, adorned with mosaics, architecturally reminiscent of an opulent Hindu tomb. Heykal entered the room with the quick, irreverent step of a gambler who can’t wait to bet the house. An intense, oppressive, almost agonized silence greeted him. He’d arrived at the critical moment: the croupier had just thrown the ball onto the roulette wheel. It rattled around, struggling like a trapped mouse, and the sound filled the room. The atmosphere was feverish, the heat suffocating; no breeze came in through the enormous picture windows with their panoramic view of the sea. Heykal walked past the groups of gamblers glued to the edges of the long table, but nobody turned—even an earthquake couldn’t have wrested their concentration from the wheel. The ball went on rattling as Heykal made his way to the rear of the room where a ramp led from the side of an immense bar back to the bathrooms. The men’s room was empty. Heykal held his ear to the door to make sure nobody had followed him down the corridor; no footsteps, just a muffled rumble in the distance—the ball must have finally landed, releasing the gamblers from their agony. The moment seemed right for him to go to work. He pulled the poster from his pocket, slapped glue on the wall above the urinals, and quickly put it up; now the governor would get to see all the casino’s clients unzip. It was simply fantastic! Heykal stood back to admire his masterpiece. He was still savoring it with malicious delight when he heard the sound of footsteps in the corridor. This complicated things: for him to be seen would inevitably arouse suspicion. And if it was someone he knew, he’d be hard-pressed to avoid a conversation that might drag on dangerously. The light switch was within reach; he flipped it, plunging the bathroom into darkness, and slipped behind the door. The footsteps, heavy and ungainly, came closer, and a man entered the bathroom. The pale light from the corridor revealed an enormous mass stumbling toward the urinal, a middle-aged man, very fat, and, at first glance, unfamiliar to Heykal. He was mumbling indistinctly and must be very drunk. Heykal stood still, holding his breath. He didn’t dare move yet; he was waiting for the man to start urinating so he might escape unnoticed. The man had turned his back and spread his legs, his massive silhouette cut out against the background of white tile; he seemed to be struggling with his fly. He was drunk enough not to be bothered by the lack of light, and Heykal was about to hand it to himself when the man began to sputter complaints about the casino management. He leaned over—with surprising agility, given his condition—to the light switch; there was a click, and the brightness returned. Before Heykal could make a move, the man saw the portrait of the governor on the wall. After a moment of shock, he let out a hoarse, strangled cry and collapsed, waving his hands above his head as if hoping the universe itself might come to his rescue. Heykal jumped, startled by the suddenness of it all. Slowly he approached the man, who lay splayed out on the floor, his fly gaping open; such an enormous mass and so still, as still as a corpse. He was dead. His bulging eyes continued to stare at the governor’s portrait with ferocious intensity; to Heykal it looked like the two men were engaged in a grotesque standoff. He left without waiting to discover the reason for this furious antagonism.
The clamor in the casino made Heykal think the news of the stranger’s death had already spread, but he soon realized his mistake. Someone had hit the jackpot, and the gamblers were celebrating this outbreak of luck. Heykal took advantage of the sparkling mood to cross the room unnoticed and go out onto the promenade. When he got to the disco, he claimed an empty table next to a dwarf palm and sat down to wait for events to take their course.
There was no doubt the man had suffered a heart attack while looking at the governor’s portrait. This death wasn’t part of the plan, but Heykal didn’t mind—it was the hand of fate (and proof of its sense of humor). The first man to see the poster had dropped dead! As long as the rest don’t follow him down this path—in which case we’ll be looking at a wholesale slaughter! Heykal didn’t want that. Alert to the slightest development, he turned a benevolently ironic gaze on the complacent bourgeoisie gathered there, all pumped up with their pathetic privileges. The casino was the most fashionable spot in the city, with admission restricted to members of the elite. But fascinated though Heykal was by the inanity of the crowd he soon came to a glum realization: these people were all intolerably ugly—an ugliness that was unforgivable, unremitting, and untempered by even a trace of kindness. They weren’t even having a good time! They were stuck in their roles, unwitting players in the lugubrious comedy that was unfolding around them. Humanity is ugly: Heykal had always known that. But this—this was almost more than he could bear.
He turned to look at the governor’s box, something pleasant to latch onto. There was Soad with her father and the governor. The others had disappeared; even the governor’s mistress was gone, probably off to sing in one of the nightclubs. The young girl was seated on the armrest of the governor’s chair, and she seemed to be begging him to grant her some favor, using all the charms of her precocious femininity. She leaned toward him and stroked the back of his hand softly, the way people stroke hunchbacks for good luck. The governor, clearly struggling to resist her juvenile attempts at seduction, looked mortified. Heykal couldn’t tell what Soad wanted from the governor. It intrigued him, and he continued to watch with curiosity.
The governor was the sort of public figure who stumps even the cleverest caricaturists. What could they do that nature hadn’t already accomplished? Short and potbellied, with stubby legs, he had a squashed nose and huge bug eyes ready to pop out of their sockets. Under his gaze, you became a miscreant microbe, magnified a thousand times over by those monstrous, staring orbs. But in fact the governor was only trying to show that in this city of chronic sleepers he was awake. No one could deny that. He saw everything that went on around him; he took himself for an eagle and acted as if he had an eye to match. He’d been appointed governor by one of his army pals (who was promoted to a government minister as a reward for his perfect mediocrity) and jumped at the chance to make up for years of inactivity. He governed the city as if he were commanding a troop of new recruits, inventing prohibitions each day, always with painful consequences for the long-suffering people. You would think he wanted to break a record. The only thing he hadn’t dared to outlaw yet was the playing of trictrac in cafés. He was said to be considering it all the time, but so far his advisers had dissuaded him by arguing that trictrac was an essentially reactionary institution that deserved government support.
Soad was standing next to the governor’s chair, tugging at his sleeve and gesturing with her head toward the dance floor. At last Heykal understood what she wanted; she wanted the governor to dance with her. But the governor was stubbornly refusing, trying to wrest his arm free while a loo
k of comic alarm spread over his gnomelike face. Heykal felt a flash of admiration for Soad; the girl was going out of her way to put on a great show. At one point, she glanced at him with a malicious smile on her lips, as if to make sure he noticed how much trouble she was taking to provide him with entertainment. It was true: to see the governor dance would be a veritable godsend for anyone with a taste for the local color. Heykal flashed an encouraging smile at Soad, then went back to observing the crowd.
The mood in the room had changed in the last few minutes. There was an imperceptible nervousness among the personnel; the waiters and maître d’s were running around looking confused. Several customers had risen hastily and gone into the game room. Around him Heykal could feel the ripples of an underlying tension, a gust of mysterious panic. People who’d been speaking loudly suddenly began to whisper among themselves; others fell silent altogether. Only the orchestra sustained its deafening clamor, but then some mistakes in keeping time made it clear that the musicians, too, were aware that something terrible had happened. Someone, Heykal concluded, must have discovered the dead body on the bathroom floor. His heart fluttered as he thought of what would happen next.
“Hello, Heykal.”
Before him was a young man as beautiful as a wild gazelle; his slender face swayed gracefully at the end of a long neck, which set off the extreme prettiness of his delicate features. He had big, bedroom eyes with soft eyelids, and he used them to dazzling effect. He was a particular kind of social climber, a borderline gigolo often seen with women of a certain age and a certain fortune. His name was Riad. One of Riad’s ambitions was to get into Heykal’s circle, for he admired Heykal without reserve and tried to imitate him whenever he found himself talking to people who were unacquainted with the original. Heykal didn’t enjoy his company and kept him at a distance, but Riad’s obsessive interest in the goings-on among the city’s elite made him valuable; he kept Heykal abreast of the gossip and rumors that were spreading through government circles. Riad flaunted his connections shamelessly; he hoped to dazzle Heykal with the depth of his penetration into the most sophisticated milieu. It never occurred to him that such people disgusted Heykal, that his sole interest in them was as fodder for his cruel humor.
“Heard the news?” Riad said, sitting down at Heykal’s table.
“No, but I hope you’ll be kind enough to tell me.”
Riad paused, batted his eyelashes, and his neck swayed as it always did when he set about charming a reluctant audience. He soon realized that he’d better hurry up. Under the circumstances, he couldn’t afford fancy phrases; Heykal might hear the news any minute, and Riad would lose the benefit of bringing it to him. But it pained him to omit the preliminary niceties, so he allowed himself to be just a little mysterious.
“Well, the governor’s going to be very happy!”
“Why?” asked Heykal. “Isn’t he happy enough already?”
“His worst enemy just died,” Riad finally blurted out. “You know, Abdel Halim Makram, the rich industrialist. He had a heart attack in the bathroom of the game room.”
“He deserved it,” Heykal said. “What an imbecile! How could anyone be the enemy of the governor—such a delightful man!”
“You don’t know the story? A few months ago the governor stole his mistress from him—that old relic, Om Khaldoun, the singer. Now she’s the governor’s trophy.”
“But everyone knows Abdel Halim is impotent.”
“Doesn’t matter. He didn’t know everyone knew. On the contrary, he was worried the singer had told the governor—she was a woman, it was inevitable. So he developed a virulent hatred for him. Old men can be terrors when it comes to their virility.”
While talking with Riad, Heykal never lost sight of the governor’s box. The moment was approaching when the death of Abdel Halim would become common knowledge. He couldn’t wait to see how the governor would react. Soad had renounced her magnificent plan to make the governor dance and was sitting quietly next to her father, listening with a bored expression as the two men carried on an energetic discussion. The governor looked pained, like someone whose vanity was being bruised; his interlocutor must have been feeding him the usual stream of sarcasm. His mustache twitched and he lifted his hand now and then, as if to fend off the flood of offensive eloquence. Heykal saw Soad yawn with perfect innocence, making a public display of her boredom. In their box, separated from the public, they seemed to be the only ones not affected by the anxiety that was in the air.
“Virility,” said Heykal. “Poor Abdel Halim was only so sure he’d lost his because he was wasting it on an old woman with faded charms. His snobbery—his obsessive desire to be the lover of a famous singer—overwhelmed everything else. It would have been unworthy of his fortune to sleep with some unknown young woman who nobody talked about but who would have satisfied his desire. People would call him cheap. He just wanted to impress his fellow citizens.”
“That’s entirely correct,” said Riad. “But that’s not all. Would you believe what they found on the wall above the urinal? A poster with a picture of the governor and a text extolling his virtues! Strange coincidence, don’t you think?”
“What exactly are you saying? That the portrait of the governor was responsible for the heart attack?”
“Indubitably. Abdel Halim was, by several accounts, drunk. The governor’s face looking down on him while he urinated—reminding him, you could say, of their bone of contention...What a terrible shock!”
“Interesting theory,” admitted Heykal.
“And it’s a crime! You could justifiably claim that the governor killed him. Indirectly, of course, but still—doesn’t change the fact that it happened that way. So what do you think of that?”
Once again Riad batted his eyes; he was like a novice hooker who has but a single trick with which to launch her career. He wanted Heykal to know that he too possessed a critical mind, that he could savor the humor of the situation just as much as Heykal. But his plan fell flat. His companion was uninterested.
“Nothing to say?” Riad was downcast. “I would’ve thought a story like that was made to please you.”
“It pleases me enormously,” said Heykal, in order not to disappoint the young man totally.
Riad smiled hopefully but without batting his eyes; it was useless. He launched into a violent diatribe against the governor, certain that Heykal would approve.
“The governor has launched a brazen ad campaign,” he said. “He must think we’re imbeciles. What I read on that poster was absolutely inane—stupefying. His abuse of power has gone too far, don’t you think?”
“My dear Riad, you’re much too young to be able to appreciate the man and his merits,” responded Heykal. “He’s an exceptional person; he knows what he’s doing. I admire him more and more with each day. Your naiveté pains me.”
Riad’s delicate, feminine features expressed infinite disappointment, as if he’d just been told of his own death. But it was worse: it was the collapse of a whole way of looking at things he had believed he shared with Heykal. He searched in vain for an appropriate reply to Heykal’s condescending allusion to his youth, but his thoughts were interrupted by the distant roar of an ambulance heading toward the casino. It got louder as it approached, piercing the air with its anguished wail. At the sound of this harbinger of disaster, the people around them froze in expectation. Riad, head swaying, looked Heykal up and down, and his smug expression returned, as if the noise of the siren had proved him right. But Heykal had turned back to the governor’s box; he was transfixed by the spectacle taking place there. The governor was standing on his chair, scanning the room with his big, bulging eyes in an attempt to locate the origin of the danger; he looked ready to crush a revolution. Then the siren stopped, and Soad let out a peal of laughter. She was looking at Heykal; their eyes met, and his smile was more mocking than ever.
9
THAT MORNING, looking out at the sea from high up on his sunny terrace, Karim had had an intuitio
n that the day would be ripe with comical events. Now, giving them time to materialize, he took short, even steps down the long, dusty avenue, stopping from time to time in the shade of one of the bordering trees. He was ready, primed for the unexpected; he noticed the smallest detail of the dizzying spectacle the street presented as workers and people seeking work milled around, ran into him, jostled past, and overwhelmed him with words and gestures that seemed to be invested with an inscrutable, fateful significance. Karim was as happy as could be. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to wander the streets in search of the unexpected. Everything he saw and heard made him indescribably happy, increasing his good cheer. The darkened interiors of the shops looked like dens of mystery, and his mind filled with sensual images of the refinements of seduction, so that he lingered in the doorways hoping to glimpse something thrilling inside. One thing he always hoped to stumble on was the kind of meaningless incident that becomes a pretext for bouts of invective. He loved listening to the men angrily insulting each other in the most colorful language. There was one particular expression that he was always certain to hear every time he observed an altercation between two men. No matter what their social class—and most of the time these fights broke out among the poorest of the poor—one man was sure to say to the other, with an air of outraged dignity, “Don’t you know who I am?” This delighted Karim. How did people come by this exaggerated self-regard? He’d always wanted to find out. It was unbelievable: in this city any old bum took himself for a luminary. Start with the government baptizing that crumbling road by the sea a “strategic route.” These delusions of grandeur trickled down from on high! All the arrogant trash-talkers were only following the honorable example of their government.
But it was not just with the intention of taking a leisurely stroll that Karim found himself, at such an early hour, out in the blazing sun on a major thoroughfare and among a sullen mob moving sluggishly through the heat and dust. Yesterday evening he’d received an official summons ordering him to present himself for questioning. This hadn’t thrown him in the least; he’d expected it. It was the follow-up to the inquiry the police were conducting because of the cursed strategic route. So well before the appointed hour he’d gone out to savor the atmosphere of the street at leisure and to prepare himself for the interrogation, which would determine whether he could stay on in his new apartment. While he dawdled, he wondered if that old wheezy policeman who’d risked death to climb up his six flights of stairs a week earlier had kept his promise to write a favorable report. Would he, after accepting the kite, turn out to be an ingrate? Karim replayed the scene in his memory—the painful hesitation of the aging father who suspected a bribe. That he might have succeeded in corrupting an officer in the line of duty made him laugh, but only for an instant; he didn’t feel calm at all. He’d still have to answer pointless questions and grovel and snivel in order to get them to forgive his past as a revolutionary. It required preparation. Like an actor getting ready for the role of his life, he began to transform himself into the picture of humility, twisting his face into the expression of someone crushed by the burden of his responsibilities. Unfortunately there was no mirror, no window in which to examine himself. To rehearse a role of such import without being able to correct the inevitable flaws—and however small, they could still cause damage—was proving an arduous, challenging task. He tried resuming his normal look, smiling broadly to erase the expression of suffering from his face. No matter what, he was sure to disgust them, all those idiot cops who wanted to kick him out of his comfortable lodging and throw him into a hovel in the slums. He was attached to his spacious terrace and the sea breeze, both essential for testing his kites. But more than that, it was a question of honor—above all because of that ineffably ingenuous “strategic route.” It was really too beautiful; how could he not plumb it to its most ludicrous depths? He just had to make sure to stick to his plan, acting inoffensive and obsequious, almost simpleminded, careful never to utter an intelligent word—that was the biggest risk. To demonstrate intelligence was as good as spitting in their faces. But how was he going to dim the sardonic glint in his eyes? Dark glasses? Pretend he had conjunctivitis? What a marvelous idea! Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier? But it was too late now, and anyway, he couldn’t afford to buy the glasses.
The Jokers Page 9