The Golden Scales

by Parker Bilal

  ‘All of that is peanuts.’ Farag gave a nonchalant wave of a hefty hand bearing a fake Rolex whose gold effect was tarnished. ‘The real money is in movies.’

  Makana looked around him for something he might have overlooked. The gloomy, cluttered room, the worn furniture, the dusty piles of paper . . . Whatever Farag’s game was, it didn’t look as though finding money, real or otherwise, was exactly one of his strong points.

  ‘Try to see it from my point of view. Hanafi is concerned. I need to give him something.’

  This reminder caused Farag to reconsider. He swallowed with difficulty, took the cigar from his mouth and examined it.

  ‘This isn’t like growing okra and sticking it in bags, enta fahim?’

  ‘I understand, but I need to know if you have any idea where Adil might be right now.’

  ‘Look, I’m not his mother. Adil is a grown boy. He can take care of himself.’

  Makana tried another tack. He nodded up at the grubby posters on the walls, none of which looked a day under thirty years old.

  ‘You really think Adil could make it?’

  ‘Sure.’ Farag grinned, cheering up. ‘Why not? He’s a good-looking man, and there are girls out there who would do anything for a film star, you understand?’

  ‘I get the picture. So, tell me, were you actually working on something, or is this just more cigar smoke?’

  ‘Oh, yes, indeed.’ Farag sat up, as if he had hooked a live one. ‘We have a script. We even shot a few scenes. Want to see?’ Perhaps he thought Hanafi might invest in his hopeless project. He began rummaging about until he came up with a remote control. A screen to Makana’s right hummed into life. There was a whirring sound and a series of clicks. Unsteady lines chased each other vertically until they eventually settled into something like an image. Makana could make out two girls who appeared to be fondling one another on a bed. There was a muttered curse, followed by the whirr of the tape fast forwarding. Then more clicks and clunks.

  ‘Ah, yes, here we are.’

  This time the image was of a room in a brightly lit house. Sunlight flashed in the distance off something shiny. The camera panned rather inexpertly around the room.

  ‘Is that Adil’s house?’

  ‘No, it belongs to Vronsky . . . one of my production partners. Ah, here it is.’

  Makana turned his attention back to the screen as a door opened and Adil Romario entered. He was tall and slim and dressed in a crisp white shirt and jeans. He wasn’t striking, but probably good-looking enough to be considered handsome. But as far as his thespian skills were concerned, he left a lot to be desired. Removing his sunglasses, he moved around the room in an awkward, self-conscious fashion. He seemed to be going through the motions like a man in a trance. He appeared to be looking for something – opening drawers, etcetera. There was a sound behind him and he spun around, eyes wide in theatrical alarm. The bad acting was distorted by the shaky image, as if filmed by someone with a bad case of delirium tremens. Makana had a feeling he knew who the cameraman was and a brief sweep past a mirror confirmed that it was indeed Farag himself. The woman who had just appeared in shot was slight and young and quite beautiful. She was holding a pistol like it might bite her.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she demanded, rather uncertainly.

  ‘I’ve come for what is owed to me.’ Adil Romario delivered his lines with all the energy of a tired man ordering a sandwich in a snack bar. He moved into a lengthy monologue, most of which he got straight. It wasn’t much of a monologue to begin with, but it was delivered in the wooden staccato of a man who has difficulty reading from a sheet of paper.

  ‘Who’s the girl?’ Makana asked.

  ‘Mimi Maliki. She’s new. Hasn’t really made it yet. She will, though. Look at that face!’

  Farag was enthralled by his own work, staring at the screen with rapt attention, the slack mouth hanging open, cigar forgotten.

  Makana found himself drawn in by this fleeting glimpse of his quarry. He scoured every movement, every gesture, in Romario’s underwhelming performance, in search of some clue as to what was going on inside his head. He saw an angry young man determined to turn himself into a god of the screen. Having no natural talent might not be much of a hindrance to someone who was already a big star. Adil Romario had his face impressed on the hearts of his adoring public already, which made Makana wonder why he wanted to go to all this trouble? He clearly didn’t enjoy acting. So why do it? Was it just the money? And why here of all places?

  ‘How do I get in touch with this Mimi?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I can’t help you there. A professional matter.’

  ‘I could make it worth your while.’ Makana reached for the envelope.

  ‘It’s not a matter of money. It’s simply the principle of it.’

  Farag didn’t strike Makana as someone to whom principles meant a great deal. His attention was drawn back to the screen as a voice shouted ‘Cut’. The tape ran on a little further as the camera continued to roll, apparently forgotten. It panned around the room dizzily, obviously dangling in the hand of the director, affording a fleeting glimpse of the sea in the distance. As it vanished, Makana caught a brief glimpse of another woman. She was standing back in a doorway as if trying not to intrude. It wasn’t clear if she was part of the set-up. She was dressed in a dark skirt and white blouse that resembled a maid’s uniform. Then the screen went dark.

  ‘Not bad, eh? You see what I mean?’

  ‘I’m not really an expert.’ Makana got to his feet and handed one of his cards across the desk. ‘I’d like you to call me if you hear from Adil.’

  Farag grinned, revealing teeth stained the colour of corn. ‘Anything for Mr Hanafi,’ he said thickly.

  ‘Oh, and do you think I could borrow that tape for a few days?’

  ‘Please, be my guest.’ Farag rattled it out of the machine. ‘I have plenty of copies.’

  Makana glanced at the receptionist as they went by. She looked away quickly.

  Chapter Ten

  Across the street from Farag’s office was a news stand where a man was serving tea and coffee through a narrow, blackened hole chipped in the wall. He had a telephone that worked, perched on the ledge. The plaster round the aperture was stained black from being continually rubbed by human hands, and from the countless cups of coffee and tea that had been passed through it. Makana dialled his home number and accessed his telephone messages. There was one from Soraya Hanafi asking if they could meet. Another from Okasha, who wanted him to call as soon as he got the message. When Makana finally got through it sounded as though he was inside a speeding squad car.

  ‘You took your time,’ yelled Okasha above the siren.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘I am going to ask you a favour which you cannot refuse me.’

  ‘You haven’t told me what it is yet.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. You still can’t refuse me . . . this is about your girlfriend from Aswani’s. Two detectives are arriving from Scotland Yard in London.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ said Makana. ‘She was in the police?’

  ‘No, but her father is a lord or something. Now, listen to me – one dead Englishwoman is enough of a headache without adding in politics. Anyway, the point is, you have to be there.’

  ‘You don’t need me.’

  ‘Already you have saved my face by telling me about the disappearance of her child. And besides, you speak English better than any of my fool assistants. It’s nothing, just a formality. They will fly in, look down their noses at us for a while, and then write their predictable reports saying our methods are as ancient as the pyramids.’

  ‘I still don’t see . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to see, you just have to be there. The point is to make a good impression.’

  The area around the Hilton Hotel in Tahrir Square was strangely quiet, considering it was midday and that this ought to have been the high season for tourists. Across the street a s
ingle bus pulled up to the National Museum and disgorged a handful of intrepid figures. As he got out of his taxi Makana saw Okasha coming towards him, one finger raised. ‘So, tell me this, if her father is a lord and whatnot, why stay in a cheap hotel and not here? These things don’t happen in the Hilton.’

  ‘Maybe she wanted to be closer to the Egyptian people.’

  ‘Look at that.’ Okasha nodded at a pack of small boys rushing up to surround a solitary Westerner who had emerged from the hotel. They were all yapping and waving sheets of papyrus at him. ‘A year ago they would have charged you ten pounds a picture. Nowadays you can get ten for one pound.’ The besieged man tried to flee, first one way and then the other, panic replacing his confidence as he gave up and hastily retreated into the hotel.

  The lobby was deserted. A couple of Chinese in padded jackets were smoking and smiling, taking photographs of one another against the backdrop of the river, while a French group were drinking coffee and gesticulating wildly. Other than that the atmosphere was strangely muted, as if everyone was waiting for something to happen. The waiters stood around in listless pairs, having given up trying to look busy.

  ‘It’s ironic.’ Okasha swept imperiously past the metal detector with a perfunctory salute. ‘It couldn’t be safer in this country right now, but people are still too scared to come.’

  ‘You can’t really blame them.’

  Barely two months had elapsed since the worst terrorist attack on record had taken place in Luxor in Upper Egypt. A group of armed men ran into the Temple of Hatshepsut and massacred sixty-two people, most of them tourists. They gunned them down, eviscerating and decapitating a couple of them for good measure, before running for the hills. Security forces managed to gun down as many people as were killed by the attackers. The radicals were later discovered in a cave nearby. They were seated in a circle after apparently having carried out some kind of suicide ritual. The number of foreign visitors to Egypt had plummeted since then, causing a severe slump in the tourism sector.

  ‘In a way they made our job easier,’ said Okasha. ‘Everyone hates the Islamists now.’

  Take the food from people’s tables and they will turn on you pretty quickly. If the Nile was the lifeblood of the country, the ancient temples which dotted its banks put bread on the table for some eight million of its citizens. The upside was that the Luxor attacks appeared to be a last-ditch attempt by a group which already felt their cause had been marginalised. The previous year the government had offered an amnesty to some of the twenty thousand Islamists being held in prison, in an attempt to alleviate the problem. Too little, too late, some warned. But nobody was planning to let their guard down, least of all Okasha who took the task of hunting down militants as his own personal mission in life.

  ‘By the way . . .’ he grasped Makana’s arm as they surveyed the lobby, ‘I looked up the investigation into the English girl’s disappearance.’ Okasha heaved in a lungful of air. ‘Elizabeth Markham, the mother, was uncooperative, to say the least. They discovered drugs in her room. And she refused to explain what she was doing in this country. Her story was full of holes. As you can imagine, that didn’t go down well. They dismissed her as crazy . . . paranoid. They even considered the possibility that she might have sold the child herself, to make some money.’

  Makana tried to square this with the image he had of Liz Markham searching desperately for her lost daughter. Could it have been remorse for her own actions that had brought her back here, year after year?

  ‘She told me she’d had problems. That’s why she couldn’t come back right away.’

  ‘Maybe they locked her up.’ Okasha glanced around. ‘Okay, so which ones are they?’

  Turning his attention back to the lobby, Makana picked out a couple sitting on a sofa in the far corner as the most likely candidates. A man and a woman, both in their thirties. The woman looked to be slightly older than her companion. Slim and with short dark hair, she was wearing black slacks and jacket. The man beside her was large and red-faced, heavily built, with thinning sandy hair.

  ‘There.’

  Okasha followed Makana’s gaze. As he did so the woman got to her feet and turned to face them. ‘You’ve done it again,’ he murmured, as he led the way across the room. The formalities were dispensed with as briefly as possible. The British detectives introduced themselves as Bailey and Hayden. They weren’t from Scotland Yard, as Okasha had thought, but from something called Special Branch. The woman was the senior of the two, something which it took Okasha a while to grasp. He insisted on addressing Bailey alone and ignoring the woman until Hayden cleared her throat noisily.

  ‘Just to make it clear, Inspector, this is a formality. We are not here to take any part in the investigation, or to pass judgement on you.’

  ‘You are looking for a connection to her father?’ Makana asked.

  ‘Lord Markham is a member of our House of Lords.’ Bailey spoke as if lecturing a couple of schoolboys. Okasha sniffed and threw him a wary look. The intricacies of the English peerage escaped both the inspector and Makana. They had little bearing on a murder investigation in Cairo. If the British felt it necessary to go to all the expense of sending people around the world to please one of their titled subjects, then that was their business.

  ‘On the telephone, you mentioned that you believe she was tortured before she was killed?’ Hayden enquired.

  ‘That is correct.’ Okasha nodded briskly. ‘Look, if you have information suggesting this was a political murder then you must share it.’

  ‘I’m afraid we’re not allowed to do that,’ said Bailey, with a poker-faced expression.

  ‘They’re playing games with us,’ muttered Okasha to Makana as they descended the steps to the waiting cars. ‘They want to connect this to our terrorist problem.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Politics. It gives them a big stick to beat us with.’

  It seemed unlikely, but while Okasha gave the orders, doors slammed and the convoy raced away, Makana couldn’t help wondering if there might be something he had failed to spot in all this. Could there be a connection between Liz Markham’s death and the recent terrorist outrage?

  Okasha had obviously decided to impress the visitors with his security measures. Motorcycle outriders wailed past them with sirens blaring and lights blazing. The circus was coming to town.

  ‘Is this really necessary?’ asked Hayden.

  ‘You are our guests. We give you a welcome like a president.’ Okasha was grinning like an idiot. Makana noticed the other officer, Bailey, shaking his head to himself. Clearly, the spectacle served merely to confirm his perception that the police in this country were a bunch of clowns.

  When they reached the square outside the Al Hassanain Hotel they were met by a crowd of onlookers and a heavy police presence. Okasha leaped out and started issuing more orders left and right in his usual muscular fashion, making his men jump. It was quite a performance. The entourage jogged up the stairs into the lobby of the hotel. Hayden looked around, taking in the general air of decay. This clearly wasn’t the Hilton.

  The manager was a podgy, unhappy-looking man in a gellabia. He wore round spectacles and an expression like a sheep being led to the slaughter as he scurried along behind, asking when he would be able to have the room back. Okasha batted him away like a pesky fly.

  The blood on the floor had congealed into a rigid brown map stretched out across the tiles. The chair and the bloody strips of towelling had been removed by the forensics team. Hayden and Bailey paced about the room, clearly hoping to find something that had been overlooked. There wasn’t much to see. Okasha had made sure of that. Makana remained in the doorway. He stared at the brown mark and wondered about the woman whose life had ended there.

  ‘We would like to see the body,’ said Hayden.

  ‘Of course.’ Okasha nodded. ‘Unfortunately, it cannot be arranged before tomorrow. Today is Friday and the medical officers do not work today.’

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p; ‘Don’t work?’ echoed Bailey.

  Okasha stood his ground. ‘That is correct.’ He smiled. ‘You should take advantage of the fact – do some sightseeing and shopping. We have the most historic bazaar in the world. Or have you seen the pyramids? I can arrange for a car to take you there.’

  ‘We’re not here on holiday,’ said Bailey as he pushed by into the hallway. He lit a cigarette and stood glaring into space, pointedly ignoring Makana.

  ‘That’s most kind of you, Inspector, we’d be happy to accept,’ said Hayden with a conciliatory smile.

  ‘Very well. A car will remain here to take you wherever you like.’

  With that, Okasha stepped out and jerked his head for Makana to follow. They took the stairs down to the lobby and went to a café in a square nearby. Okasha studied his surroundings carefully before choosing a table and sitting down at it with a heavy sigh. He spread his legs and pushed back his coat so that the large pistol in the leather holster at his waist protruded visibly. He eyed everyone in sight warily, like a cowboy in a film, until satisfied there was no immediate threat in the vicinity. He never let his guard down. He couldn’t afford to.

  ‘We’re wasting our time, playing tour guides for the interfering British.’

  Okasha grunted and snapped his fingers in the air for tea, which came faster than Makana had ever seen. He leaned over the table, his big hand plucking a couple of leaves off the sprig of fresh mint set in the middle. He dropped them into his glass where they floated limply, lost tropical islands in an amber sea.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he said. ‘I think I would have lost my temper if I had been alone. Such insolence!’

  ‘He was just doing his job.’

  ‘You’re being too generous. Perhaps it is your nature, or maybe the years you spent in their country with your wife left you with happy memories.’

  Makana reached into his jacket and produced the newspaper photograph showing Adil Romario standing with Gaber and the group of men. Next to Gaber was the slight man Makana had failed to identify.