The Golden Scales

by Parker Bilal

  ‘But you do.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Gaber quickly. ‘And now . . . his mind has gone. Age, illness, I don’t know. It’s all slipping away from him, but he won’t let go. If I didn’t act, he would take us all down with him.’

  ‘You were trying to protect him from himself? Or trying to save the company for yourself?’

  Gaber’s head sagged low, as if he could no longer bear its weight, his face dipping into shadow. But you didn’t need to see his face to feel the emotion in his voice.

  ‘Hanafi started to get sentimental. I knew he was planning to hand everything over to Adil. He doted on the boy. You’re right. He never saw me as anything but an educated fool. He would never let me take over.’

  ‘So you decided to cut Adil out of the equation?’ Gaber nodded. ‘And you enlisted Soraya to your cause.’

  ‘She saw what was going on. She understood the danger the company was in, and she knew that Adil was an obstacle and a threat.’

  ‘You heard about Bulatt, that he was still alive and well and living just next door. Who told you, I wonder? Was it your friend Colonel Serrag?’

  Gaber remained tight-lipped. Makana continued.

  ‘You arranged a friendly match in Khartoum and sent word to Bulatt. You thought he would take care of things from there. Only Bulatt had other plans.’

  Through the window behind him, Makana could see the trees on the terrace bending in the high wind. There was a storm blowing and the air swirled with fine dust which seemed to glow like particles of gold in the brilliant spotlights that illuminated the penthouse.

  ‘You must have realised there was a certain risk, bringing Bulatt into the picture.’

  ‘Of course,’ Gaber snapped. ‘But you must understand my position. I had no choice. I was convinced that if something wasn’t done, everything would be lost.’

  ‘So Adil came back, alive and well, and recruited into Bulatt’s plans for revenge.’

  ‘I know nothing of all that. All I know is that Bulatt tricked me. He didn’t get rid of Adil. Instead he came here himself.’

  ‘He came because Adil went missing. You didn’t know what was going on. All you knew was that you had to deal with it as discreetly as possible. Bulatt persuaded you to hire me.’ Makana paused. ‘You were still on talking terms with Bulatt then. You didn’t know that he had his own plans. You had no choice but to go along with him; with Adil missing you had nowhere to turn.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to think.’ Gaber put his face in his hands. ‘For all I knew the young fool had got himself into some other trouble. I just knew that if anyone started snooping around they might come up with all kinds of things. I couldn’t risk that.’

  ‘And Bulatt promised he would get rid of me when the time came.’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Gaber lifted his head and conceded the briefest of nods. Then his expression froze and his eyes drifted off to a spot somewhere over Makana’s right shoulder. He turned to see Hanafi standing in the doorway. How long he had been standing there it was impossible to say, but from the look on his face he had overheard enough.

  ‘What is this? What is going on?’

  He stepped into the room. He moved like a drunk. Perhaps it was the medication they had given him, but there was something wild and deranged about him. The silk dressing gown he wore had come undone. Underneath, a vest and undershorts peeped through. He made no attempt to adjust his clothing, and seemed completely oblivious to his appearance. His hair stood on end as if he had been sleeping on it. Or tearing at it. He stepped closer to them.

  ‘You killed my boy? You, of all people?’ Hanafi was barefoot, his feet like pale mice creeping across the carpet in fits and starts. ‘You were nothing, nobody, when I found you.’

  Gaber began to rise. ‘Now listen to me, Saad. Whatever I did, I did for the sake of all of us . . . for the company.’

  ‘Listen to you? I have listened to you for long enough.’

  By now he was upon Gaber. His open hands were swollen with age and rheumatism, but they came down hard like the wooden paddles of a steamer, relentlessly pounding Gaber to the floor. ‘If it wasn’t for me you would be out there peddling your ass! Selling insurance to old ladies . . .’

  Gaber raised his hands to defend himself but sank under the blows. He tried to grab something to help him stay upright and pulled the fancy blotter, the telephone, the heavy cut-glass ashtray, on to the floor with him.

  ‘He’s dead! Do you understand that? You killed my son!’

  ‘It’s not like that,’ Gaber protested, crawling back towards the bookcase, blood pouring from his nose and a cut over his left eye. Hanafi’s strength seemed to belie his age. His fists drew back again and again to land on Gaber’s head until it sounded like a pulped melon. Eventually he stood up and turned to face Makana. His hair and clothes were in disarray and his face was smeared with blood. Makana could hear a faint wheezing sound coming from behind the desk which told him the other man was alive, if only barely. Hanafi was staring straight through Makana, his eyes wild and unseeing.

  ‘Baba!’

  The haunted gaze lifted and Hanafi let out a cry as if he had seen a ghost when Soraya rushed across the room towards him. He threw up one arm to keep her back.

  ‘No! Don’t touch me!’ Then he turned away, stepping blindly into the French windows behind him. The doors flew open as he crashed against them, letting in a gust of wind that sent papers flying.

  Hanafi staggered out, carried by his own momentum. Makana watched as Soraya followed her father out on to the terrace, reaching out to him time and again. Each time he would brush her off and move further away. Finally, she stopped and watched helplessly as the strange figure pirouetted across the terrace as if upon a stage. Hanafi had the grace of an ageing ballerina, a drunk or a madman who manages to avoid, by some miraculous sense of balance, the most obvious traps and pitfalls. Staggering and somehow not falling, he made it across to the other side. With a little hop he stepped up on to a bench and then suddenly he was standing on the parapet of the terrace. The updraught from below flapped the hem of the gown around his plump legs so that he resembled a broken umbrella, or a large, ugly vulture whose wings had lost all coordination. He raised his hands and shouted something, as if addressing the world far below him. Soraya threw out her hand. ‘Baba!’ she cried, one last time, and then he was gone.

  Chapter Forty-four

  Soraya Hanafi walked into the dining room of the Al Hassanain Hotel and looked around uncertainly. It was empty at that dead hour of the afternoon. The few guests staying there appeared to be out, busy struggling through traffic, no doubt, trawling for bargains in the bazaar, or trying to capture this vast, unfathomable city in a neat series of images inside a tiny box. Finally, gratefully, she spied Makana across the wide room.

  He was sitting very still at one of the tables in the far corner by an open window, staring out at the square below and the old mosque. There was a timelessness about this place, he was thinking, that made all of our problems seem like brief shifts of the light. He didn’t notice her until she was standing over him.

  ‘I wasn’t sure this was the right place,’ she said.

  Makana got to his feet, instantly annoyed with himself for feeling awkward around her. To his irritation he noted that once again she looked quite stunning. It seemed that she didn’t even have to try, it came naturally to her. She was dressed casually in a dark suit with a black silk shawl swept around her upper body and over her head, as if she didn’t want to be recognised. The light breeze stirred her clothes, adding to the impression of insubstantiality.

  ‘You said it was urgent.’

  ‘Yes, thank you for coming,’ he said, gesturing at the seat opposite his. Soraya took one look at the furniture, the broken-backed chairs and the grubby plastic tablecloth, and shook her head. Her eyes were red and swollen, her face pinched and drained of colour.

  ‘It has seen better days,’ he sighed, looking around desperately for
an alternative.

  ‘All part of the charm, I suppose,’ she said, glancing round the room as if on the off-chance she might spot some of that elusive quality lurking in a corner.

  ‘I think it would be helpful for you to see the room.’

  Soraya sighed. ‘All right. But, please, can we get this over quickly?’

  ‘As fast as possible, I promise.’

  Makana led the way to the staircase. On the third floor he produced the key and opened the door. He gestured for her to enter. There was a moment when he thought she might not go through with it, but then she bowed her head and stepped forward. She stood just inside the doorway. Makana went past her and over to the window. He had to wrestle with the shutters for a time before they gave way, flying out with such force that they bounced back, almost slamming him in the face. Eventually, he hooked them into place and surveyed the view.

  If there was any single reason why guests who found themselves staying in this hotel by some accident of fate or necessity decided to stay on, this view was the most likely explanation. The authors of countless romantic novels would undoubtedly have been able to summon a thousand and one adjectives to describe it and none of them would have been adequate. An accumulation of centuries of history, jumbled up together in one glorious scene. This was the way it had always been, and anyone who thought otherwise was either insane or deluded.

  ‘Why have you brought me here?’

  He turned back to face her. The room itself exuded a dreary air. The heavy old telephone with its circular dial. The chipped and cracked walls. The raw bulb dangling from the ceiling on a length of stiffened electrical cord. Between them, the bed formed an awkward, uncharted sea of possibility. Uneven and listing to one side, with the headboard chipped and scratched, it told countless stories, most of which would not have been fit for children’s ears. The room told another story, too, one that was more disturbing. It had been cleaned thoroughly but it still harboured the recent memory of Liz Markham’s death.

  ‘You know why,’ he said.

  Soraya stared at him. A flicker passed across her face and the stiffness in her manner seemed to dissolve. Once more she looked like a little girl, unsure how to begin this awkward dance.

  ‘This is where she stayed?’

  ‘She must have remembered it,’ said Makana, turning to survey the view from the window once more. ‘This is where she stayed when she came with her daughter, years ago.’

  Soraya cast an eye over the room with renewed curiosity.

  ‘At first I thought you couldn’t possibly remember,’ he said. ‘The mind can play tricks like that. It is some kind of protective mechanism, I believe. It cuts out things we are unable to understand, or which our minds cannot absorb.’

  Her gaze refused to meet his. It fluttered round the room like a trapped bird looking for an avenue of escape.

  ‘The things we don’t want to remember . . . things that are too painful to face . . . they get locked away, deep in our memory, so well hidden we don’t even know they exist.’

  Soraya took a tentative step forward, and then another, finally sinking down to perch herself on the edge of the bed. The springs erupted in protest like a chorus of hungry cats.

  ‘One day something, or someone, triggers off a chain of events, a sequence of clues, that leads us back through the maze. In my case it was you.’ Makana lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the window. ‘The image I had of you as a child, running through these streets with nowhere to turn.’

  ‘Me?’ she asked.

  ‘Little Alice managed to vanish without a trace. There was no ransom note, no demand for money. Nobody knew anything. Liz Markham didn’t help matters. There was a big fuss. A little English girl goes missing in the Khan al-Khalili. You can imagine. They promised no stone would be left unturned. But none of their efforts turned up anything. Liz was hysterical. The police weren’t sure they believed her story. Even her own embassy thought her an unreliable witness. She had a history of drug abuse. What was she doing here? they wondered. Had she sold the child?’

  ‘You would need a lot of influence to make something like that go away.’

  ‘Exactly. Somebody with a lot of influence . . . Someone like Hanafi.’

  ‘How did you know?’ she asked, stroking the faded coverlet on the bed.

  ‘In the Gezira Club I told you about the murder. I didn’t mention that Liz Markham had come here looking for her daughter. Yet the next time we met at your office you asked about the child. You knew.’ He paused, watching her as she absorbed this in silence. ‘In Hanafi’s office there is a picture of you when you were small. Your hair must have darkened with age, but even when you were about thirteen it was still quite light.’

  Soraya got to her feet and made as if to leave. Makana cut her off, swinging the door shut. She winced at the sound, instinctively raising a hand to protect herself. Slumping back, she sagged against the wall as if she might collapse.

  ‘Do you remember any of it?’

  ‘Bits and pieces, like a dream that I couldn’t place. I didn’t know what it meant.’ She was facing away from him as she spoke. ‘I don’t think I wanted to know.’ Her voice was vague and lost, eyes fixed dully ahead of her. ‘In the beginning they kept me in this strange place . . . a house in the country. There were two women. The old one I called The Witch, she was evil. She hit me. But the other one was kind. When I cried at night, she would sit with me and whisper stories. I remember the palm trees at night, rustling overhead. I wasn’t afraid though. I felt safe. I didn’t miss my mother. I know that sounds strange, but I didn’t want to go back to her.’ She lapsed into a long silence. ‘You learn to live with it. You eat. You sleep. And slowly, very slowly, you forget. I was four years old. In time I was brought into the family. I met the elder sisters. They took care of me. They accepted me as one of their own.’ Soraya rolled her shoulders along the wall, first one way and then the other. ‘We had so much in common, he and I. I’d never known a father. It was easy to believe he was the one. In time it becomes more difficult to face the truth than to live the lie.’

  The sound of voices drifted up through the open window, the rhythmic intonations of someone reading a sura from the Quran. Makana moved to the window and looked down, leaning against the frame as he fished his Cleopatras out of his jacket again. Down below people milled about. A man bent over, resting one hand against the wall of the mosque in exhaustion. All of them, like busy little insects, striving to improve their lives, to move onwards and upwards, to find a place to rest, if only for a moment.

  ‘When did you realise you were not Hanafi’s daughter?’

  ‘An Englishwoman who came back every year asking questions? It was only a matter of time before word got back to Gaber.’

  ‘He told you?’ A brief nod. ‘And yet you never felt the need to go to her, to see her?’

  ‘She sold me!’ Soraya’s voice was ragged as she twisted round to face him. ‘Can you imagine what that feels like, to know that you were sold for money so she could carry on with drink and drugs and men?’

  ‘You don’t know that she did that.’

  Soraya’s hair had come loose, veiling her face. She brushed it aside. ‘I did see her. I followed her one day. One of Gaber’s men pointed her out to me and I followed her for a while. I thought I would feel something, but I didn’t. She was a stranger to me,’ Soraya moaned, pressing her hands to her eyes to stem the tears.

  ‘You had a better life where you were. You didn’t want to go back.’

  ‘I knew nothing about her, except that she left me here. She abandoned me and returned to her life in England. I owed her nothing.’

  ‘You wanted to be Hanafi’s daughter. More than that, you wanted to be the heiress to his empire. And then Gaber told you about Adil and you knew Hanafi would hand the business to him. He didn’t care about the stink it would raise. Hanafi wanted a son. All his life he had wanted one.’ Makana brought his head close to the wall where hers rested. ‘So you tried seducing A
dil, thinking you could get rid of him that way, with a scandal. Only he turned you down, didn’t he? His heart was set on another. And when he told you about Mimi Maliki you decided to get rid of her, to pay her off and send her away.’

  ‘She had no right to get involved.’

  ‘You were going to tell me, weren’t you? That night in your office. That was why you called me over. You were going to tell me that you knew you were Liz’s daughter. But somehow you couldn’t, so you made up some story about being pregnant. You thought that might throw me off track.’

  ‘I was confused. I don’t know what I wanted . . .’

  Makana edged closer to her.

  ‘The funny thing is that you and Adil were not all that different. You both came into Hanafi’s family as strangers. You both wanted to belong. Adil wanted it more than anything. He knew he would never be accepted by you and Gaber, that once the old man was gone you would probably figure out a way to get rid of him.’

  ‘What was she like?’ Her voice was soft now, as if the fight had been knocked out of her.

  ‘Your mother?’ Makana looked around the room for a moment. ‘I think she was a good person. Like most good people she wasn’t perfect. She made one mistake and spent the rest of her life paying for it. She came here to try and make it right, and she died for it.’

  ‘I can remember running through the bazaar,’ Soraya’s dreamy voice continued. ‘I saw myself reflected in all the shiny glass and metal surfaces, like a star inside a world of mirrors. I’ve always kept that memory, deep down inside me, of that little blonde girl with pigtails.’

  Chapter Forty-five