The Golden Scales

by Parker Bilal

  It wasn’t just the formalities which had changed, it was the very nature of crime itself. You picked up a victim by the side of the road with a bullet in his head, or a man with water in his lungs lying in the middle of the desert, and you asked yourself, how could this have happened? Nobody really wanted to know. As Major Idris reminded him more than once: ‘You’re a smart man, Makana. Smart enough to know that if I tell you these things are out of our hands then there is no need for you to worry yourself further.’

  Muna tried to persuade him to see sense. They sat together at night in the yard and whispered in the dark, fearful of the neighbours overhearing their words across the wall. Everyone was afraid of informers. Another sign of the times.

  ‘You rationalise everything,’ she chided him gently. ‘For you it always has to make sense.’

  ‘Am I supposed to stop thinking about catching criminals and start protecting them?’

  ‘It’s a warning. Don’t you see?’

  ‘I can’t just look away.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I uphold the law. That’s my job. They can’t tell me that the law goes only so far and no further. Idris is an idiot.’

  ‘Idris is trying to help you. If you looked at it like that, you might be better off.’

  He still remembered her face at those times – arguing fiercely because she was convinced she could show him what he couldn’t see, and often she was right. When she knew she was not getting through a kind of lost smile appeared on her face, as if she was seeing ahead to some time in the future when she was no longer around and he would be remembering her.

  It was a good marriage. They complemented one another. Their life together ran a smooth, untroubled course. The only difficulty they had was in starting a family. It took five years for her to become pregnant. And when Nasra finally came, she nearly cost Muna her life. They promised one another they would never go through that again. It wasn’t worth it. They called her their little victory – Nasra. Only one? people asked. And they smiled and said, in this case, one is enough.

  Makana told himself that he didn’t believe in fate, or even God, if truth be told. But how could you explain the sequence of events if it was not pre-ordained in some way? He didn’t know where it began, but he could certainly recall the moment when he began to see that things around him were changing, evolving, slipping out of his grasp.

  He walked on through the old bazaar, looking for the face of a child he knew he would never find.

  Chapter Five

  According to the gossip pages, Adil Romario was romantically involved with an actress in her thirties named Lulu Hamra. Perched on the Louis XIV-style sofa in her apartment, she snatched tissues from a gilt box studded with coloured stones as if plucking feathers from a hen. She was surprised, she said, that Makana had come to her. Secretly, however, she seemed flattered. Lulu Hamra’s star had long since faded to a dim glow.

  ‘They are always finding new actresses, young girls who will do anything to get a part.’ She fixed Makana with a direct stare to ensure he was in no doubt as to what she was implying. As for Adil Romario, she still loved him, of course. ‘But he broke my heart,’ she sniffed, dabbing deftly at the corners of her eyes to stem the flow of running mascara. ‘Adil may be many things, but artistic he is not. He thinks his destiny lies in the movies. Who doesn’t these days? I told him, you need an artistic soul. It was the truth, but my honesty cost me his affections.’ Her substantial bosom heaved with torment. ‘Look at me, my heart is torn in two.’ It seemed that Makana was a little behind the times. As far as she knew, Adil had lost interest in her. She kept breaking off her sobs to ask for assurances that details of this relationship would not be released to the press: ‘A woman in my position has her reputation to think about.’

  ‘I’m sure your reputation is unblemished.’ Makana tried to summon up conviction and failed miserably. ‘Did your relationship end when you told him he had no future in film?’

  ‘Did it end? How can anyone think these tears are not real?’ She looked genuinely offended and Makana struggled to make amends.

  ‘I was only curious to know what had happened with his film career.’

  ‘Who knows what he did? I can’t keep track of all of his sorrows.’ Lulu Hamra snorted and buried her nose in a fresh tissue. ‘I told him what he didn’t want to hear, and he abandoned me.’ Her eyes, heavily made up with rings of turquoise and black, narrowed to slits. ‘I don’t take betrayal lying down. Ask anyone. Any man who turns on me will regret it.’

  ‘It’s entirely understandable. You were upset.’

  ‘Who knows?’ she sniffed. ‘Perhaps I went too far.’

  ‘Might I ask what exactly you did?’

  She paused, plucking out five tissues in quick succession. ‘I have a lot of influence in this town. Ask anyone. Lulu Hamra does not allow herself to be used. I made sure no one would speak to him.’ She threw back her head, tossing her hair over her shoulders, and then clapped her hands. A tiny maid appeared instantly.

  ‘We will take coffee now, please.’ When Lulu fluttered her eyelashes at him, Makana had the distinct feeling he was being considered for lunch.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said, rising to his feet. ‘But I should be going.’

  ‘Won’t you even stay for coffee?’ Lulu Hamra purred coquettishly. ‘What paper did you say you worked for?’

  Makana ignored the question, fiddling instead with his notebook.

  ‘Do you know of anyone else in the business who may have had dealings with him?’

  ‘Nobody that I know, or who treasures my acquaintance. A woman has her pride, you see.’

  Safely back down in the street, Makana stretched and filled his lungs with air, tapping his pockets in search of his lighter and not finding it. He stopped and turned instinctively, convinced for a moment he had left it behind in Lulu Hamra’s flat and might go back for it. The thought was rejected almost as soon as it came into his head, but as he turned he noticed something odd. A slim man, about fifty metres back, ducked hastily into an alleyway. It was an awkward movement. The kind of mistake that someone not too skilled at following people might make. Resuming his walk, Makana made a mental note. In his late twenties. Dark-skinned for an Egyptian. He wore a long-sleeved chequered beige and white shirt, buttoned to the neck and down to the cuffs. After buying a new lighter from a blind boy sitting on the kerb, Makana hailed a cab. He watched through the rear window but saw no sign of the beige shirt. Perhaps he was beginning to imagine things.

  Adil Romario’s penthouse flat was located in a glassy tower in Garden City. A stiff-necked housekeeper dressed in black was at first reluctant to let Makana in. She gave him the swift up-and-down appraisal of someone who knows instinctively where to place strangers on the social scale, and Makana clearly didn’t rate very highly.

  ‘Are you the one Mr Gaber sent?’ she asked in a tone of disbelief.

  ‘He called you?’

  ‘He said I was to help you in any way possible.’ She clasped her hands together and clucked disapprovingly. ‘But don’t expect I’m going to let you out of my sight.’

  Makana would have preferred to have arrived unannounced. As he wandered through the rooms with her trailing a few paces behind, putting everything he touched back in place as if she expected him to slip a few items into his pocket, he realised that the flat had been thoroughly cleaned in preparation for his inspection, which was what she obviously took this to be.

  ‘Have you been working for Adil for long?’

  ‘Almost three months. Mr Adil has never had any cause to complain. He trusts me with anything. I have always been a hard worker. You can ask anybody.’

  Quite who he was meant to ask, Makana did not know. Adil Romario wasn’t his real name, of course, his real name was Adil Mohammed Adly, but throw a stone on any street in Cairo and you were bound to hit someone called Mohammed. There was a certain tradition in Egypt of players adopting the names of famous international footballers. They
began as nicknames, among their friends, based perhaps on a favourite player. Then journalists would pick up on them and it added a touch of familiarity, not to mention glamour, to the Egyptian players and their game. There was a Maradona, a Pele, a Zidane, and so forth. There was even a goalkeeper called Beckenbauer for some reason nobody had ever managed to explain fully to Makana.

  The large black-and-white framed fashion photographs that hung on the wall suggested Adil Romario was a rather vain young man, with a lot of very white teeth, who stared at the camera with a mixture of arrogance and resentment. Why would anyone want to be surrounded by pictures of themselves? Makana, who couldn’t remember the last time he had visited a dentist, wondered if people’s teeth really glowed like that, or whether there was some photographic trick involved.

  Adil was central to the Hanafi fable. A young boy kicking a ball around a dusty street one day catches the eye of a wealthy philanthropist. It was every boy’s dream. Hanafi set up a school to rear local talent. It gave disadvantaged kids a home. He brought in expert trainers to coach them. The television channels loved that kind of thing. If the boys were lucky and worked hard they were given a place in the DreemTeem. But Adil Romario was the only one anyone really remembered.

  In the hallway a more recent picture showed Adil at some kind of gala evening, in formal evening dress and bow tie. Perhaps it was the clothes, or the quality of the picture, but his face looked puffy and his eyes dilated, as if he had been drinking. Hanafi stood next to him, one arm around Adil’s shoulders, smiling like a fat cat who had secured himself a fish.

  The apartment itself said little about Adil as a person. He seemed to have few interests outside football and movies. There were several shelves of DVDs, the films mostly featuring tall dark leading men in action-packed roles, waving guns and looking menacing. Was Adil studying for another career in films as Lulu Hamra had said? In the bathroom, Makana discovered a vast array of colognes and after-shave lotions. He sprayed a couple of these in the air for good measure, inviting a dark look from the housekeeper who appeared as if summoned from one of the bottles.

  ‘You reported him missing on Thursday. When was the last time you saw him?’

  ‘Oh, about a week before that. Maybe longer.’

  ‘A week? I understood you come here every day.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Every day. Mr Adil insists, even though most of the time there is nothing for me to do. I take care of everything. When it needs cleaning I do that. I take care of the laundry. Sometimes I cook for him, but he usually eats out.’ She sounded more like a disappointed wife than a housekeeper.

  ‘Why did it take you so long to realise he was missing?’

  She straightened her back haughtily. ‘I am not employed to keep an eye on Mr Adil. Often, I won’t see him for days. He comes and goes as he pleases and it is not my place to ask him where he spends the night.’

  ‘Then what made you call Mr Gaber?’

  ‘That,’ she said, pointing to a large glass bowl by the door. It was another one of those curious objects which seemed to strike people with too much money on their hands as a good opportunity to unload some more of it. Adil Romario probably paid somebody to clutter up the place with things like this.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, Mr Adil always leaves his car keys in it. If he is home I have to be careful not to make too much noise, in case he is sleeping.’

  Makana recalled from Gaber’s file that Adil drove a silver SUV, a Cherokee Jeep.

  ‘So sometimes he is here but you don’t actually see him, is that right?’ The woman nodded. Makana went on, ‘You noticed the keys were missing on Thursday. When was the last time you actually saw him?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe a week before that.’

  ‘A week? How about the last time you saw the keys in that bowl?’

  ‘Two or three days before that.’

  Which meant that Adil Romario could have been missing for nearly two weeks now.

  ‘Tell me about his friends.’

  ‘Oh, I have nothing to do with that side of his life.’

  Makana stared at her. ‘I am here to try and help him.’

  ‘That’s fine, but I am not paid to see things.’ Then she touched a hand to the knot that held the scarf tied at the back of her head and nodded towards something in the next room. ‘I think he keeps their names in a book over there.’

  The slim black address book rested on the desk in the study as if it had been placed there for him to find.

  ‘Did Mr Gaber telephone to tell you I would be visiting?’

  ‘No . . . Mr Gaber came by.’

  So Gaber had set the stage for him. The apartment, even this book carefully placed on the desk for the detective to find. Makana sat down. He felt like an actor following directions. When he glanced up he saw the housekeeper still hovering in the doorway, obviously worried he might steal one of the carpets or something.

  ‘Could you get me some coffee?’ He didn’t really want coffee, but he needed some breathing space. Reluctantly, she turned away and clumped noisily down the hall, every step a thump of protest. Makana flipped through the address book and dropped it on the desk. It could take him a week to follow up on every contact. Next he tried the drawers. Three of them down the right side of the desk. The top one was locked. He reached into his jacket and produced a slim, sturdy knife which had served him well on occasion. Opening it, he eased the blade into place and slid the tip under the lock mechanism on the drawer. He levered it up far enough for the lock to free itself. It was a disappointing haul. The drawer slid open to reveal nothing inside but a heap of old bills. Water. Electricity. A new television. Under these sat a leather-bound Quran. Putting this to one side, he scrabbled about at the back of the drawer where something was rattling about. His fingers found a handful of small shells. As he turned them over a few grains of sand fell out into his palm. Seashells with soft, fading whorls on their smooth surfaces. He slipped one of these into his pocket and was about to close the drawer when his eye fell on the Quran. He flicked through its pages, only to discover that half of them were glued together. The sacred book fell open to reveal that the centre had been hollowed out. It contained a thick bundle of banknotes. Adil Romario obviously didn’t trust his housekeeper entirely. When she came back, she saw the heap of money. She set the cup down with such a thump that the coffee spilled over the side and stained the saucer. Her eyes went to the drawer.

  ‘How did that happen?’

  ‘I used a little too much force,’ he smiled. ‘I thought it was jammed.’

  ‘You can’t just break people’s furniture.’

  The coffee looked surprisingly good, though he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had poured in a dose of rat poison as well. He took a sip and then lit a cigarette.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here.’

  ‘Open a window, or call Mr Gaber, I’m sure he’d like to know why it took you so long to report Adil missing.’

  She turned and left the room without another word. Adil didn’t trust her and neither did Makana.

  He turned his attention to the telephone on the desk. It had a built-in answerphone system which was activated. The counter showed it had registered twenty-one messages. He rewound the tape and went through all of them. Six were from someone at the club, a man Makana guessed was the assistant coach. Five were from Gaber and another four from someone called Soraya, Hanafi’s youngest daughter. She sounded worried. ‘Adil, where are you? Please, it’s never been this long.’ None were from Hanafi himself. Several callers mentioned that they had tried his mobile telephone and got no answer. Three were from a woman who identified herself as Mimi. Her tone was frantic. She wanted to see him. In the final one she didn’t give her name, but Makana recognised her voice. ‘Please, tell me why you are doing this to me?’ she begged. ‘What have I done?’ Then there was a long pause and a sob, before finally the line clicked and went dead with a resigned tone.

  The remaining message was not a real one
at all. There was no sense of urgency to it. Instead, in response to the beep, there was a long silence. It was so long that Makana thought for a moment there was no one there. Then he heard the breathing, slow and even. Finally, a voice enquired, ‘Adil?’ once and then fell silent. No name, no identification, no message. Still, the caller waited, as if he thought Adil might be avoiding him, refusing to pick up because he knew who was calling.

  Makana picked up the address book again and went through it. The name Mimi was circled and underscored. A series of numbers was scribbled alongside it. He tried them one after the other but they were all disconnected. No address was given.

  He spent some time going through all the names in the address book, ticking each of them off after he had made the call. Nobody had seen or heard from Adil in weeks; in some cases it was months. Despite his success, it seemed that Adil Romario had few regular or close friends. The ones Makana spoke to tended to be on the frivolous side in general. Happy-go-lucky, playboy types, media darlings, movie celebrities and television journalists with shrill voices, male or female. They told him nothing. With friends like these your absence would be noticed for about as long as it took for someone else to call.

  Makana slipped out of the flat without seeing the housekeeper again. In the front lobby he cornered the doorman, a sophisticated version of the usual bawab, wearing a uniform the colour of boiled spinach. He was reluctant to talk until Makana produced the envelope of expenses. ‘He keeps himself to himself, always polite, but you know how it is with people like that. They live in another world from the rest of us.’ The delivery boys in a takeaway place next door wore red uniforms with a logo of a monkey on roller skates holding a pizza box. A bland electronic storm of syrupy music gushed from the overhead speakers, loud enough to make conversation all but impossible.