by Ahmed Mourad
The casino business model is built entirely on milking the customer like a cow, down to the last drop in his pocket, and exploiting his willingness to bleed to death. The moment he enters he pays out tips like a farmer sowing seed in a field, starting with the taxi driver who takes a commission for every client that comes inside, and on through the parking guard, the security, the waiter, the floor manager, the pushy pistachio vendors and the even pushier sellers of roses and jasmine. There’s even someone waiting for him inside the bathroom with hand towels and cheap cologne, paying a fee to stand there praying aloud for his deliverance from all ills and holding out for a generous consideration. Then there’s the photographer, biding his time for the moment to make his move, when the customer smiles or gestures towards him, giving him the green light to take a shot. There are also those who pay handsomely for the photographer to pretend they aren’t there, to ensure they aren’t captured in an embarrassing position or dubious company.
When it comes to the booze most of the regulars bring it with them because they know only too well that these places serve locally made moonshine, and only pay for what are known as ordeef (a corruption of hors d’oeuvres) or perhaps a plate of salad, some crisp bread, ice and glasses. That’s not to mention the smoothies, like the mango juice made by whizzing a honeydew melon or potatoes in a blender and adding a little concentrate for flavor, which costs the casino nothing.
The casino relies on the munificence of the customers as they vie beneath the dancer’s feet. It only takes four or five tables of serious players with deep pockets to keep a roof over the head of every bloodsucker in the place. On top of all this there are the doctored bills, which bear additional charges like the one for delivering orders to the table and removing the empty plates (particularly for inexperienced customers), plus other tricks: a zero or two stuck on the end of a number, the bill totalled twice over, the inclusion of orders that never reached the customer, plus a corkage charge for the bottle that he brought with him.
As for the casino’s manager, whatever one might think of him, all these extra charges end up in his hands. No ordinary character, he must be experienced, worldly, wise and calm, since most of the minds he interacts with are unbalanced in varying degrees. He must have a great number of tricks up his sleeve to keep the casino alive and to keep it moving forward when it stumbles. He knows that competition creates bloody-mindedness, and bloody-mindedness breeds the recklessness that leads men with bulging pockets to hemorrhage like slaughtered beasts in Eid.
If his shows fail to get things going he will deliberately turn up the heat by bringing on a dancer with a history or a new girl who will brazenly flaunt her body to make a name for herself. He might bring on a ‘Russian show’ (real Russians with lovely white skin and blonde hair) or popular crooners who got their start on the back of peasant ballads about grapes, dates or mangos, even donkeys (who knows how others started their careers before they grew famous from music videos on TV?). If he wants to fan the flames to a blaze he goes to the casino’s safe and takes out banknotes stamped with a special seal. These are known as the quitte and are thrown down by an employee posing as a customer in the main room in order to intensify the rivalrous hurling of bundled banknotes.
After the dance come the young men with dustpans and brooms to gather up the harvest, placing their shoes over a high denomination note or two that subsequently finds its way via their socks to their wallets as if by magic. The takings are then examined, the marked notes separated and the remainder hidden in the safe, less whatever is divided between the various beneficiaries like the singer, the dancer and the other employees.
The manager has one more attraction up his sleeve, personified by the casino’s female friends and their freely volunteered services, who provide the clientele with practised pleasures. A well-stocked table is set aside for these women. It acts like an exposed wire in a swimming pool, electrocuting all those that come near it. They are joined by their gay ‘sisters’ (‘The most popular these days’), and phone numbers and addresses are splashed about with abandon. The deal is struck inside the casino and honoured in a more permissive environment.
A girl might bring a customer in from outside and make him pay a share of her bill, borrowing his money to hand out tips to all and sundry, down to the man who opens her car, clicking to attention and paying her the respect she is due.
But there are other spices to choose from: footballers, B- and C-list actors and up-and-coming starlets, each willing to dive over the Niagara Falls in return for gifts that are sometimes as substantial as cars and freehold flats. After these come the pimps and purveyors of every kind of pleasure, all of them bankrolled by the owner so that his customers can get hold of whatever it is they fancy while he secures an everlasting popularity.
The general atmosphere, the racket of music too loud to hear, the provocative dancing, the bottles, the tablefuls of women, overly generous comrades-in-arms and their male friends, was the finished dish to which the customer was drawn, just as a hungry man is drawn to a distant kebab shop by the smell of its smoke. There were those who came once a month, those who came once a week and others who came daily, treating the casino like their local café, a place to meet friends and female companions, to seal deals and toss alms to the singers and dancers.
There were even a few vice squad officers who claimed a cut of the customers’ cash and were guaranteed a meal fit to feed their entire family whenever they dropped in; plus a glass of something cold, if that was their style, and an extensive network of contacts. The tax inspectors also attended the casino each night to calculate the takings and deduct the nightclub tax, whose value rose or fell in proportion to the bulk of the warm envelope that was slipped into their pockets. Municipal officials and union representatives came to examine the performers’ licences and ensure they’d paid their dues. In their daily or weekly reports to their central offices most wrote that all was well and that the customers held evening prayers together before the evening began and distributed alms to the employees as they sipped at iced liquorice, mint and ginger.
All these formed a parasitic community living off a medieval merchant prince, who traded in slave women and scattered sacks of dinars in every direction.
Thus did Gouda instruct his pupil, and his pupil quickly caught on. Out poured thirty years of experience gleaned from the passage of days both sweet and bitter, experience that had left him with psychological scars visible to the naked eye; tales and stories that Ahmed Kamal took in one concentrated injection, the essence of a long life filled with suffering and hardship lived out in that depressing place.
Two photographers working together are known as a oueedo, a word taken from the Italian duetto, and by extension, that’s what Ahmed was to Gouda: his oueedo, or his workplace double. There had to be at least two photographers in the main room: one to take the film and print it and a second to stay behind in case the potential customer disappeared and left his pictures behind. Pictures were paid for after they had been handed over, and so Gouda would usually go and oversee the printing process, making extra copies of a single shot to trick customers who had lost the ability to count, and Ahmed would stay behind to keep an eye on the mark and photograph others.
And so the days passed for Ahmed: sleeping until the late afternoon and working until six in the morning, his day divided by a period of free time from the moment he woke to nine in the evening when the customers began to arrive.
He had no complaints about the money, especially on Thursdays and Saturdays. It was enough for him to live on and cover his basic needs. He would set aside a small amount and either buy something for his miserable sister or press it into her palm behind the back of her husband, who considered all gifts from Ahmed haram and would not accept them. Otherwise he might buy himself clothes and pass the time at the café with an old friend, reminiscing about their school days when the world was a kinder place.
Rabei el-Badri’s band had gathered up their instruments and were getting
ready to move onto another casino where Rabei would carry on where he left off, or perhaps to a wedding or two, where he would exhaust the bride and groom with his raucous songs, his pouring sweat, his hairdo slicked down with henna to hide the bald spot, and his permanently starving band members behind him. Their places were taken by seven men wearing identical black satin shirts with white lace cuffs carrying the twisting black cases peculiar to musical instruments, who started readying the stage for the arrival of Sally.
She was thirty-six years old, but looked twenty-eight, white as candlewax with wavy chestnut hair down to her waist. Her face was difficult to resist, and years of dancing had trained her body to shake even while she slept. Her eyes carried the look that says, ‘I’m more experienced than I should be.’ She was a creature of the night, and with her slender frame and the translucence of her beautifully maintained skin, she might have been a vampire.
She had started out as a student from the Faculty of Arts who had graduated at the age of twenty-one and started work as an air hostess. She hadn’t completed her second year on the job when she left with a reputation that preceded her and opened the way to alternative means of making a living. Having gone to a photography studio in Shubra and had a considerable number of pictures taken highlighting her God-given charms, she approached an advertising agency, from where she entered the world of the performing arts via music videos. She started out behind a singer with the other dancers, writhing as though poisoned, like an octopus wearing scanty underwear, before appearing as the main love interest of a broad-templed popster who wept over his sweetheart as she rode a Harley Davidson through the desert with another man, abandoning him beside a blue Roman pillar where a muscular saxophonist stood with a gold waistcoat over his bare chest.
She had a couple of relationships with producers who insisted on trying out her talents for themselves in the bedroom, examinations that she passed with flying colours. Yet that route, she soon saw, would never take her to the top and she would stay for ever second-rate, so she seized her chance in a video with a famous singer, dancing in front of him as she had never danced before. Her name was on the lips of everyone who saw this, and the world of dance opened wide before her, a world where she could realise the full extent of her talents, and watch adoring, yearning eyes embrace her, taste her, penetrate every cell of her body as she danced away, her small feet stamping the ground like a beating heart. She cast her spell over all around her and they clustered around her like frogs in mating season.
Then one day the country awoke to news of a racy videotape documenting an intimate moment between her and the famous tycoon Hisham Fathi. The tape was the genuine article and, like all decent sex tapes, it was circulated on computers and video cassettes, with some newspapers publishing stills taken from the film. Sally had a breakdown. She claimed an urfi marriage to Hisham Fathi and accused him of betraying her. She went on pilgrimage, both the Hajj and the Umra, and if it had been possible, would have gone to Jerusalem too. For a few months she was forgotten, until she returned to the TV screen, shedding tears of regret and despair over the people who had sold her out and abandoned her.
She spent a period playing the role of victim before deciding to make her comeback on the condition that, due to the scandal, she would not receive the same wage as before. She got five times more! Who wouldn’t love to see Sally, having watched her in her most intimate moments? She had become a product with undisputed selling power. The Casino Paris was her very lowest link to the past and though she tried as hard as she could to break her contract she could not forget her close relationship with the owner, which had buoyed her up through difficult times. Nevertheless, she reduced her public performances to three days a week, in addition to New Year’s Eve parties, private functions and the trips to the Gulf on which she made a name for herself second to none. They made a legend of her.
Then there was her agent, Karim Abbas; the thin man with a big moustache that almost tipped him off balance, the one who had looked after her from the time the scandal broke until her return to the limelight. She would never forget his kindness and the way he had stood by her when many were ripping her apart. He wore tattered jeans patched at the knee and a lucky charm around his right wrist, and his mobile phone never left his ear for a moment. His hair was receding a little and his nose bore a scar, the result of an argument that had not gone his way. Blue-lipped from smoking everything that grew in the ground except molokhiyya, he had found his way to this underworld long ago, when he was a customer for whom every door was opened and roses scattered in his path. Then he had developed an addiction and lost everything. Poverty made him desperate and he began thieving and conning before ending up as a pimp, ready to dance and sing at the wedding of the Devil’s daughter if the price was to his liking.
He married Sally after her fall because it suited both their interests, and though she might have been the most expensive of his wares he never stinted when it came to his serious clients (the traders, MPs and wealthy Arabs), passing her around for a fee ten times what a government clerk makes in a year. Out of concern for her safety he would deliver her himself and pick her up the next day and they would divide the spoils between them. They were an odd couple whom convenience had brought together, yet there was a noticeable affection between them, and its purity remained unsullied by the embraces of rich lovers who’d take her around the block like a bicycle. After the scandal Sally’s circle of admirers grew more varied. Her price went up and Sally el-Iskandarani’s was the most frequently dialled number in hotels and casinos; and at their head, the Pearl of El-Haram Street, Casino Paris.
A month had passed, in which Ahmed had done his best to adjust to the atmosphere of the place and his modest new accommodation. He tried to get a feel for the customers, those who wanted their pictures taken and those who didn’t, following a number of embarrassing incidents where a couple of customers had beckoned him over and a third had waved him away. He had tried to adapt, but a vast gulf always prevented him from being accepted in the place. Even with the support of Gouda, about whom he understood no more than that he was a good man who offered him support, he remained unreconciled. Gouda kept an eye out for him at all times, advising him on the workings of the casino and the way to snatch a crust from the mouths of the insensible customers.
In his daily broadcasts, unavailable on satellite television, Gouda gave him the lowdown on many of the regulars and celebrity guests. Unusually, given his habit of sprinkling magic dust over his stories, he did not add too much embellishment to these curriculum vitae, though he would end each episode with a tale or two about the horrors of his POW camp, the ravishing virgin who had killed herself when he turned her down, or the crocodile that had approached him in the Red Sea and whose eye Gouda had popped with a plastic shovel. In any case, when it came to stories about the customers he was never less than seventy percent truthful and the remainder of his information was taken from other people in the casino.
‘Wakey wakey, Ahmed.’
Ahmed’s attention had been distracted by a table covered with eight beer bottles at which sat an extremely fat man, whom he knew from Gouda to be a gold merchant. With one hand he played with his thick moustache, while the other toyed with the lower back of his female friend. He whispered to her and she gave an audible chuckle.
Gouda handed the camera to Ahmed.
‘Hold onto this and watch me.’
He approached the burly Casanova lurking at the table and calmly extracted a battered rose from his pocket, placing it in the buttonhole of a jacket as capacious as the dust cover of a car. Drawing closer, he whispered a few words in the man’s ear that caused him to burst out laughing, almost sweeping the bottles off the table in front of him. Gouda straightened and signalled to Ahmed with his fingertips that he should come over. He whispered again to the fat man, who replied by nodding his head in agreement, at which Ahmed fired off a few shots of the man, his companion alongside him with her fiery dyed blonde hair and a chest that almost lea
ped free as he gave her a squeeze like a dinosaur crushing a juice carton, laughing so hard you could practically count his fillings. Then he raised his hand, the signal that enough was enough, and Gouda motioned to Ahmed that he should continue to take pictures of the woman on her own.
Gouda winked.
‘Take a few close-ups of the lady on her own, Ahmed. They’re friends of the establishment.’
When he was done Ahmed withdrew, followed by Gouda.
‘Give me the film and stay here.’
‘I want to come with you,’ said Ahmed.
‘Come on then.’
Gouda entered the studio, which was crammed with every conceivable kind of old junk. He never threw anything away, not even empty plastic film containers, which he kept in a huge sack like a bin bag that lay in a corner of the room. There were worthless old cameras and strange contraptions whose purpose was hard to divine: some looked like sewing machines, others like surface-to-air missiles. Then there was that old cabinet, though it wasn’t a cabinet in the usual sense of the word, rather a small unit with three drawers. Its old rusted key marked with the image of a sparrow never left Gouda’s pocket.
‘What do you keep in that chest, Gouda?’ asked Ahmed.
‘That’s my little darling, that is. I’ve had it since the Giza days, Ahmed. Ah, the terrible things I’ve put in there: military secrets, passports, pictures and films, letters from Abdel Nasser. Well, it’s my work in the secret services, isn’t it?’
Ahmed stifled a giggle with difficulty.
‘You son of a gun, Gouda; you’re a tricky one. So Abdel Nasser used to write to you himself?’
‘What have I been telling you? Listen, my boy, I was in direct contact with him. There were no secretaries or bodyguards between us.’