The Golden Scales

by Parker Bilal

  Makana’s impression of this kind of paramilitary assault on supposed terrorists was that it was a very dangerous place to be. Civilian casualties tended to run high and the idea of being in the company of a band of trigger-happy policemen with semi-automatic rifles held no appeal for him.

  ‘Thanks, but I’ll sit this one out. Serrag thinks Bulatt is there?’

  ‘If he is, he’s going to wish he’d stayed dead.’

  ‘One last question. Who made the connection between Liz Markham and Bulatt?’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Okasha glared.

  ‘Was it you or Serrag who made the link?’

  ‘The only person who made that link was you.’ Irritated, Okasha waved a hand as if brushing away a fly. ‘Go, do your detecting thing. But don’t forget to keep me informed. I need to know what you are up to before Serrag hears about it, and if you think I have eyes and ears everywhere, you should see what he has. I can’t protect you from them now. If you cross the line you’ll find yourself on a plane with a one-way ticket to paradise.’

  Makana cracked open the stiff door of the police car and made to get out. Okasha leaned out after him.

  ‘By the way, where did you get that car from?’

  ‘A friend.’

  ‘I told you, Makana, you don’t have any friends except me. You would do well to remember that . . . and remember what I said about staying away from the Russian from now on.’

  ‘Believe me, I don’t want to get any closer to him than I have to.’

  ‘You know, we’re supposed to be on the same side,’ said Okasha. ‘It might be an idea for you to act like that from time to time.’

  ‘The law is only as strong as those who police it.’

  ‘Always with the philosophy,’ chuckled Okasha. ‘If only I could remember to write down some of the things you say . . . I would die a happy man.’ But the joviality in his voice was tempered by a note of unease that Makana hadn’t heard in it before.

  He should have been excited. The news that Bulatt was alive and in the country backed up his notion of a connection between Hanafi’s past and Adil’s disappearance. The link to Vronsky was also confirmed. But what really disturbed him was the sound of Okasha’s laughter, which still rang in his ears long after the police car had turned the corner and vanished from sight. Makana couldn’t put his finger on why it was that it disturbed him so. It was like hearing a songbird that was off-key and instinctively knowing something was very wrong. It took him a while to realise what it reminded him of: a faint echo of something which took him back in time, back to the old days.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  The moment Makana’s life had jumped off the rails and departed along a new and very dangerous track was burned into his memory. All at once he had found himself in a universe where the once familiar was suddenly strange.

  He should have listened to Muna. Back then, when he still had a chance to change things, he should have listened to his wife, but he didn’t. He was afraid of giving in to his own fears. So he did what any husband would do, he tried to calm her. He reassured her that they were safe, that he was a police inspector and that they would always enjoy a certain degree of protection, even when he was no longer sure how long this would last. Muna saw things more clearly than he did.

  ‘You can’t see it, can you?’ She spoke softly in the dark. ‘Or maybe you don’t want to see it.’

  ‘You’re upset.’

  ‘No.’ She rolled her head from side to side in exasperation. ‘I’m insane! Or maybe I am sane and the whole world around me has gone mad.’

  ‘Muna, please.’

  ‘You don’t understand. These people care nothing for your rules, your sense of duty. They want power, and to get it they will sweep you away . . . you and your department, even the law itself. None of that means anything to them.’

  ‘You’re wrong. There is such a thing as the rule of law. There is a constitution.’

  ‘They will rewrite the constitution to suit themselves.’

  He could argue endlessly but was never going to convince her; he could barely convince himself. She was right. He wanted to believe in the system, in justice winning out in the end, because wasn’t that the whole point for him? He had served it, fought for it, defended it with his life. Now he was supposed just to step aside and let them do with it as they wished?

  ‘People like you and me, they hate us,’ she corrected him gently, ‘because we can read and write, because we can see through them. Because we choose not to live our lives according to the norms of the seventh century.’

  Then there was victim number four.

  On the veranda outside his office one day Makana bumped into the bearded man again. The big-shouldered brute with dark, nervous eyes whom he had met under the bridge all those months ago. The discovery of the teacher who had turned out to be the first in a series of murdered women. It was this man, and his unit of the People’s Defence Force, whom Makana suspected of the crime. The bearded man, still dressed in his peasant clothes, carried himself with the same swagger, moving around the police department as if it was his own personal domain, a battered AK-47 slung over his shoulder. His fierce black eyes glared malevolently as he brushed by. When Makana turned, he found Mek Nimr standing there.

  ‘One of yours?’

  Mek Nimr was rising fast in the Revolutionary Security Force. There were rumours he would soon be offered a post high up in the National Intelligence and Security Services. He no longer wore a blue police uniform but instead dressed in paramilitary fatigues with a camouflage pattern, as if in preparation for deployment in the jungle somewhere.

  The RSF answered to no one. They did as they pleased. He peered over Makana’s shoulder and smiled.

  ‘People transfer in and out of the unit all the time. You know how it is.’

  Makana knew how it was. The ways of these new militias made little sense but they were here to stay and he had better get used to that.

  ‘How is your wife by the way?’ Mek Nimr asked then.

  ‘My wife?’

  ‘I heard she had been taken ill. Was it the pressure of having to take over the department at such short notice?’

  ‘You almost sound as if you care.’

  ‘Come now, we old colleagues have to stick together.’

  They talked as equals now, but even this was a pretence. While Mek Nimr’s career was in full flight, Makana’s had stalled. The CID department had gradually been whittled down to himself, a clerk and an adjutant who doubled sometimes as his driver. Everything else had gone, including filing cabinets, typewriters and all the rest of it, commandeered or seconded, whatever the term was. Makana now occupied an out-of-the-way room that had once been a storage space for stationery and office equipment. One side of the room was piled high with tables, chairs and filing cabinets nobody wanted to see again, all of which threatened to topple over on him at any moment. Still, it served a purpose. He had selected a new table and chair from the clutter of broken and abandoned furniture. The telephone rarely worked and the ceiling fan either ran at an insanely high speed or not at all. He had two windows, one of which was entirely blocked by the clutter. Nowadays he spent most of his time staring out of the other one.

  ‘Muna’s fine,’ said Makana quietly.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. We must take care of our women, the mothers of our children. You should consider asking her to resign her post. After all, it’s not a decent job for a woman.’

  ‘What are you talking about? She’s a botanist. She studies plants.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  The self-righteous look on Mek Nimr’s face might have been comical if circumstances had been different. It had puffed up like a blowfish. ‘I was concerned,’ he said.

  ‘Concerned about my wife?’

  ‘Well, obviously, concerned that anyone should want to teach that we are descended from monkeys. Aren’t you?’

  ‘Darwinism. I forgot you were something of an expert.’

  ‘An exp
ert, me?’ Mek Nimr looked embarrassed, glancing along the veranda as if worried someone might overhear and take what was being said seriously.

  ‘Of course, it’s just a theory.’

  ‘Ah!’ Mek Nimr’s face showed relief. ‘So it’s not proven?’

  ‘There are those who believe it is true.’

  ‘Believe?’ Mek Nimr grimaced, getting back into his stride. ‘Come now, you make it sound like a religious faith. Is that what it is, a faith? A religion that worships monkeys, eh? That must be quite something.’

  ‘It’s not a religion. It’s a science.’

  ‘That must be where I got confused. I was never very bright at school, you know. I didn’t have the benefit of having a teacher for a father, like you did.’

  Mek Nimr’s laughter echoed along the veranda as he walked away. It was the laugh of a man who never questions the fact that he is on the winning side of history. Makana watched him go. Over the balustrade he watched Mek Nimr emerge from the stairwell below. His men were waiting for him in the compound, standing in the dust, leaning against the pick-ups. A change seemed to come over him as he addressed them before getting into the lead vehicle. The little man’s inner fury seemed to stir up a storm that swirled about him. The men cheered and raised their guns in the air. Makana realised that he was witnessing a remarkable transformation. He was one of the few people who had known Mek Nimr in the old days, when he was just another ordinary policeman who lacked the resources to go far. Then times had changed. He had seized his opportunity and profited from it. The militia men jumped on to their pick-ups and raced out of the compound, horns blaring and guns waving.

  Muna used to bring home with her stories about the ‘morality police’ who would roam the campus advising students and staff alike that their clothing was un-Islamic. A campaign was launched from time to time, targeting lecturers. One day a student handed her a pamphlet that was being distributed around the university, urging people not to attend the lectures she was giving on evolution, filling in for her late professor. These lectures were denounced as part of a ‘zionist kafir’ plot to undermine Islamic morality and replace it with the modernist ideology of the unbelievers. Both she and Makana tried to dismiss the campaign as nonsense, but Mek Nimr obviously knew about it.

  Makana carried on in the old ways, trying to solve the new wave of murders. They were vicious, cold-blooded crimes that someone was covering up, he was sure of it. Some person or persons unknown had launched themselves on a bloody killing spree and they were acting with impunity, which probably meant they were protected.

  The second murderered woman was found in the scorched yellow grass near a dusty patch of ground where the boys played football. Metal goalposts without nets were the only indication of what went on there. The girl was naked. The students who had found her had covered the body with sheets of newspaper that they had weighed down with stones. They seemed outraged about having to witness such a sight, as if the dead girl had decided to have herself raped and murdered just to cause them personal offence.

  Her name was Awatif. She was nineteen years old and her father was a prominent lawyer, known for his opposition to the regime. A close friend of Amir Medani’s, Awatif was in the third year of an architecture degree. There were one hundred and ten students in her class and most of them described her as a hard-working, decent girl. Most of them. Gradually another picture emerged as some claimed that Awatif was opinionated. That the clothes she wore were not always as decent as they should be. That she refused to cover her hair properly. They said she was stubborn and proud, and that it was no doubt her own vanity which had led her to her awful fate. Makana stared at the girl who told him this, her plump cheeks pressed out like ripe fruit by the tightly wrapped grey headdress that covered her hair. ‘People like that think they are better than the rest of us.’ Her smug, self-satisfied expression betrayed no sympathy for the dead girl.

  The third victim turned up in the old war cemetery, among the headstones of British airmen who had died half a century ago defending this corner of their empire from the Italians, who flew in across Abyssinia in their Fiats to dump their payloads on the flying boats stationed on the Nile. It seemed symbolic, leaving her there, particularly as the victim, Layla Awadallah, twenty-seven years old, was of mixed blood. She had an English mother. Her father was a doctor who had trained in Durham in the sixties. She worked in a travel agency. The body had been ravaged by the dogs that roamed the cemetery at night. It was hard to reconstruct what had been done to her before she died from the damage inflicted by the wild dogs afterwards. Like the other victims she had been raped repeatedly. There was no connection between her and either of the other two.

  Aged between nineteen and thirty-five, the victims of this wave of killings were educated, professional women: a teacher, a university student and the manager of an airline agent’s office. They were all subjected to sexual assault by multiple attackers. All were left in plain view, in places where they would be found quickly. No attempt was made to bury them, or to hide the bodies in any way. It was as if they were being left out as a warning. Finally, they were all gagged, and in their mouths, when the gag was removed, a piece of chalk was found. A stick of classroom chalk. Nothing more. The message was obvious: keep your women at home or they will end up like this.

  Makana worked alone. He didn’t talk to anyone, didn’t submit a report to his superiors. Major Idris took no interest in what he was doing; so long as things were quiet he made no objections either. Nobody really cared except Makana, or so he told himself until one day when he began to notice a small white pick-up following him around. Wherever he went it would be right there behind him. Whenever he came out of a place he would spot it parked nearby, a man sitting behind the wheel reading a government newspaper. They didn’t even bother to hide any more.

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  As he drove south along the six-lane carriageway of Sharia al-Haram, Makana’s mind was in free flow, turning over the facts in his head as he understood them. By his very absence, Adil Romario seemed to be unravelling the world that had revolved around him, like a black hole that appears in a corner of the universe and sucks all the light into its void. Maybe Sami Barakat was on to something when he talked about astronomy. On his way out, Makana had stopped by to speak to Hanafi. It was inconvenient, he was told, as Mr Hanafi was on his way to an important meeting in Amman. But Makana insisted and in the end five minutes of the magnate’s precious time was conceded to him in the subterranean garage. The door of the white limousine was held open for him and Makana climbed inside to find himself perched on a fold-down seat facing Hanafi and Gaber.

  ‘What is this about?’ snapped Hanafi’s right-hand man, clearly irritated.

  ‘I need to know,’ said Makana, addressing Hanafi directly and ignoring his lieutenant, ‘if you have any reason to believe that one of your old enemies might be behind this?’

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Hanafi growled. In the uneven streaks of light from the neon strips illuminating the basement, fury made his face look stark and cruel. His eyebrows were arched and his nose flared. The lines of his face were all drawn together as if he were about to implode.

  ‘I am talking about Daud Bulatt.’

  ‘Bulatt is dead,’ said Gaber. ‘He died years ago.’

  ‘Yes, where was it?’ A touch of pleasure lightened the dark expression on Hanafi’s face. The thought of the death of his old rival seemed to amuse him. ‘Afghanistan? One of those places Allah has forgotten about. Of course, that’s why he went there, to fight for the glory of Islam. Well, good luck to him.’

  ‘Bulatt may not be dead,’ said Makana.

  The smile faded away slowly and Hanafi sat straighter. ‘Not dead? What are you talking about? Of course he’s dead.’

  ‘There are rumours that he is here, in Egypt.’

  ‘Do you have any idea what you are saying?’ asked Gaber.

  Makana glanced at him. ‘I’m sure you have plenty of contacts inside the secu
rity and intelligence services. It shouldn’t take much to confirm this.’

  ‘I should have killed him when I had the chance,’ muttered Hanafi. He sat brooding like a squat bullfrog, fists balled tightly on his plump thighs.

  ‘Do you think that Bulatt would have any reason to take Adil?’

  ‘Who knows what he might do? The man was insane, even back then. You think he has my boy? What for? What could he hope to gain by doing something like that?’

  ‘Apart from the obvious?’

  Hanafi frowned. Gaber leaned forward and pointed a finger.

  ‘If he is in this country, the entire weight of the security forces will come down on his head. He will find nowhere to hide.’

  ‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ said Makana. ‘Bulatt seems to be resourceful enough to have eluded them so far.’

  ‘But what possible motive could he have for taking Adil?’

  ‘The oldest motive of all,’ said Makana, ‘revenge.’

  Hanafi’s thick fingers closed around Makana’s arm like an iron clamp. He leaned close; his breath had a cloying sweetness to it.

  ‘Find him. Please, just find my boy and bring him back. If that man has him, I will bring the wrath of his god down on him so hard it will teach him the meaning of religion all over again.’ Then he turned and struggled out of the car. Gaber leaned out after him.

  ‘Where are you going? We have a plane to catch.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Hanafi grunted, ‘until this matter is resolved.’

  ‘Why can’t you just stick to finding Adil?’ Gaber slumped back in his seat and glared at Makana. That look stayed with him, even now, like a point of darkness against the bright glare of the road ahead.

  It was busy today, with vehicles of every shape and size vying for position. The road was a chaotic mudslide, crammed with all manner of jumble and debris, broken bits of metal junk flying down into the abyss. People took their lives into their hands to cross it, stepping between the lanes of traffic as if performing some ancient dance with death. They paused with cars rushing by in front and behind them, so close it made their clothes billow.