Vertigo

by Ahmed Mourad

  April 2005: the Bar Vertigo incident. There was a third party present: the party that committed the crime. The pictures are in the white envelope. Publish them and call for an investigation to be opened in exchange for some pictures I have of you: lots of newspapers would love to see Galal Mursi’s dark side. We met before in the casino. You won’t remember me.

  The blood fled from Gala’s veins. He didn’t have time to think. He ripped open the second envelope with his bare hands and pulled out its contents. He flipped nervously through the photographs. It was a shock; he had never imagined what it would be like to hold this burning coal in his hands.

  He was looking at the final photograph when a small piece of paper, which had been tucked between the last two pictures, fell to the floor. It contained a postscript:

  There’s a sample of your photographs at the Shorouk Bookshop: history section, fourth shelf, fifth book from the left: ‘The Fall of the Fatimid State’. This book is in great demand.

  It was signed with a smiley face.

  The gland above his kidney released an additional dose of adrenaline. Stuffing the pictures into the yellow envelope, Galal leapt to the door and went out to his secretary who was busy typing something on the computer.

  ‘Mahitab! Who brought this envelope?’

  ‘Someone handed it to security just after ten o’clock yesterday.’

  He didn’t wait to hear her question about his bulging eyes and the beads of sweat drenching his face and staining his collar.

  ‘Is something wrong, Mr Galal?’ she said, but he had already rushed out like a madman, covering the distance between his office and Talaat Harb Square in a single minute.

  He entered the Shorouk Bookshop and took out the note, ignoring the salesman whose face lit up on his arrival. The history section … fourth shelf … fifth book from the left … The Fall of the Fatimid State. Galal pulled it out and flipped rapidly through its pages until his eyes fell on the photograph.

  It was a photograph of him at the casino with a young girl. He didn’t spend long looking at her; he recognised her right away. He tried to collect himself. Taking the remaining copies of The Fall of the Fatimid State, he examined them all, checking they were empty. He asked the manager if anyone had bought the book or asked about it since yesterday and he said no. He left the bookshop and stopped next to the statue of Talaat Harb, watching the pedestrians in the noisy square. He felt the oppressive presence of the person who was playing so calmly with his nerves. He started peering at everyone who looked at him, as though they might be the source of the photograph that he turned between his hands.

  There was something written on the back: Didn’t I tell you that he who cooks with poison tastes it?

  14

  The following morning, 6.15 a.m.

  The ringing of a mobile phone echoing in the quiet bedroom; a tousled head stretching out a hand to feel the bedside table until it found what it was looking for.

  The words ‘private number’ pulsed steadily. He pressed the green button and in a hoarse voice answered the call.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Good morning, Mustafa,’ a voice said.

  ‘Good morning, sir.’

  ‘I’m at the office. How soon can you get here?’

  ‘Twenty minutes.’

  ‘Don’t be late.’

  A quarter to seven.

  Mustafa Arif knocked on the door to Safwan el-Bihiri’s office, his eyes red from interrupted slumber.

  ‘Enter.’

  It was the voice of Safwan, who was sitting in an open-necked shirt, his loosened tie dangling from him like a hangman’s rope, and examining photographs on the desk in front of him.

  ‘Good morning, sir,’ Mustafa said.

  ‘How are you, Mustafa? Come and take a seat.’

  ‘What is it, sir?’ Mustafa asked once seated. ‘You worried me.’

  ‘Operation 63.’

  ‘The bar?’

  ‘There was a witness who photographed what took place.’

  ‘Photographed, sir? The targets were all eliminated.’

  ‘Photographed from another building. He got everything.’

  Safwan took a white envelope from his desk and threw it down in front of Mustafa who picked it up and began going through the pictures, his eye quickened by sudden activity.

  ‘How did we get hold of these pictures, sir?’

  ‘Galal Mursi. Luckily for us, the witness sent the pictures to him yesterday.’

  ‘So the witness is in our hands?’

  ‘No. Unfortunately, this is a blackmail attempt. The identity of the witness is unknown.’

  ‘What’s Galal’s connection to this?’

  ‘The witness has photos of Galal. You know his file’s dirty: that business with the young girls. If Galal doesn’t publish the photos he’s threatened to write to another newspaper with the pictures of Galal.’

  Mustafa was scrutinising the image of the man who had carried out the operation that was reflected in the mirror.

  ‘Tariq’s picture is the real problem. If these pictures are published the world will turn upside down.’

  ‘The leadership is yet to be informed. We’ve got very little time. We have to get this sorted. The casino where he goes must be turned inside out. Galal said there was a young journalist working for him called Alaa Gomaa. He fired him from the paper and there’s a grudge between them. He suspects that this guy is the one behind the pictures; he could be the person messing with him.’

  ‘And if it turns out to be this guy?’

  ‘He disappears: him, his pictures and his source – should there be one. There’s no time, Mustafa. If necessary, Galal disappears too; if he slows you down, he disappears. Where’s Tariq at the moment?’

  ‘On a break, sir. He’s gone to the North Coast for a couple of weeks.’

  ‘He doesn’t need to know. But if something happens, that may change.’

  ‘Sir, his nerves are shot. He spoke to me before he left; he wants to be transferred to a desk job.’

  ‘Now’s not the time for that. Extend his holiday until we see about this disaster we’ve got on our hands. He may not return to work at all.’

  ‘OK. Is there anything else I can do, sir?’

  ‘I’m not going to end my long career here with a scandal, even if I have to purge my own people, got it, Mustafa? We keep our cards very close to our chests; I don’t want a living creature to get a whiff of this. If I leave this place then you’re coming with me. Remember that.’

  Mustafa nodded to show he understood. ‘Don’t worry, sir.’

  He exited, leaving Safwan gazing at the office calendar. He only had a year to go. One year and he would leave the service. He had prepared for an illustrious departure for a job in an oil company at ten times his current salary – free time, raising the grandchildren and enjoying the perks – but thick smoke had begun to fill his chest: a growing feeling that he would not last a week.

  At four thirty that same day, Ahmed was standing outside the Yasmina flower shop near Gallery Creation. It had taken about forty-five minutes at the barber to get his hair straight after using half a tub of gel to force it to submit to the comb. He had put on a black shirt that closely resembled the shirt worn by Amr Diab in his music video for the hit song Two Moons, polished his black leather shoes and remembered his watch and the knock-off Hugo Boss cologne. Placing his Cleopatra cigarettes in a Marlboro packet, he turned to the mirror and began striking the poses, standing and sitting, that he wanted Ghada to see him in for the first time.

  He looked handsome.

  A little while later and in front of the flower shop he stood clutching a red rose, his eyes turned unwaveringly in the direction from which Ghada would come. Scenarios began to crowd into his head. Dismissing the ones with unhappy endings, he began swimming through his fertile imagination, adopting a posture similar to that of Amr Diab in one of his videos: resting his right leg on a parked car to give himself the air of a serious player.

/>   The hands of the clock moved slowly around. He felt a powerful sense of excitement and anticipation. Half an hour went by and Ahmed had just entered overtime when he spied a figure in the distance; a familiar figure. The girl came closer and he saw that it wasn’t Ghada: she was not as beautiful although her body resembled Ghada’s from afar.

  It was half past five. Perhaps she was held up at work. Why hadn’t he written down his phone number? Idiot!

  Six o’clock. The rose wilted in his hand. The owner of the flower shop dragged a chair over and sat outside his shop smoking a shisha. He was directly behind Ahmed, who was made uncomfortable by two things: first, the eye of the observer and the second he couldn’t recall just at that moment. He started noticing girl after girl in the distance like drops of water from a half-closed tap. The gathering dusk and his ancient glasses, whose prescription was due for a change, made Ghadas of everyone in the street.

  Seven. She hadn’t come. The shop’s owner brought out another chair and invited him to take a seat. ‘Sit down, sir, you’ve been standing for ages. Waiting for somebody? Need a telephone?’

  How he longed for a comet to plummet from the heavens right into the shop and turn it to dust; or even for a terrorist attack with a cruise missile onto the head of this sarcastic parasite. At least, that’s how Ahmed felt as he looked at his watch for the third time (after the thousandth) since he had arrived.

  She won’t come, he told himself.

  He threw the rose away and lit a cigarette. It was twenty past eight. Should he go to the gallery? She might be held captive. Maybe she was being punished, her face to the wall and her hands raised. No: she’d rejected him. She most likely didn’t fancy him. She had probably driven past in a car with her friends, who had laughed when she pointed him out: ‘Ghada, what’s that? A shrimp in specs!’

  The sound of their laughter rang in his ears and the echo of their voices grew louder. Terrifying Hitchcockian scenarios started to make a killing inside his head.

  ‘I’ll count to sixty and if she hasn’t come I’ll leave.’

  ‘245, 246, 247, 248 … I’ll count to three hundred.’

  Ten o’clock.

  ‘She won’t come.’

  The walrus was going to love this.

  15

  ‘She didn’t show?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Ahmed. ‘She didn’t show.’

  They were sitting at the Layalina Café; their daily routine.

  ‘I knew it! Didn’t I tell you?’

  ‘Enough, don’t make a drama of it, and besides, maybe something happened. How would you know?’

  ‘Just try and be strong, that’s all. If I was in your shoes I’d kill myself, to be honest. You didn’t leave her your phone number?’

  ‘No. Drop the subject, will you?’

  ‘Well, maybe she walked past and you weren’t paying attention.’

  ‘My eyesight may be weak, but I’m not blind. There wasn’t a single girl walked by me that I didn’t see.’

  ‘What about this, then?’ said Omar, waxing poetic: “he said he waited by the flower shop, waited until he was ready to drop”?’

  ‘Very nice, dear.’

  ‘Anyway, how do you think our friend Galal is doing?’

  ‘He’ll be about to explode. He won’t sleep.’

  ‘We’ll call him tomorrow. Drive him crazy. Couldn’t we have demanded a fifty to help us out a bit?’

  ‘That would ruin the plan. A slow simmer is the best way to reach boiling point.’

  ‘Think he’ll know who it was?’

  ‘The picture was taken without a flash, and we made it the quality of a mobile phone shot and got rid of the details. He’ll think it was somebody at the table next to him. He won’t remember me: you don’t notice much when you’re with a chick.’

  He had not forgotten Dracula, the only person who had seen him taking photographs, but something inside him made him believe that this burdensome being intended no harm. He would have caused it at the outset, if he had.

  ‘Where will you call him from?’ asked Omar.

  ‘From the very last place he’ll imagine.’

  Ahmed spent a night of fluctuating emotions, between joy at the cinematic blow he had dealt Galal (lifted from I Know What You Did Last Summer) and his feelings about Ghada’s rejection. Most exhausting to him psychologically was that he had no idea how to respond. Should he pass the ball back to her or leave the field? Had some difficulty prevented her from coming? Something inside him made excuses for her; she hadn’t seemed cruel or arrogant.

  He leafed through his thoughts until his eyelids grew heavy. Tomorrow would be a full day.

  The night passed and in the morning Ahmed went to the studio as usual. His mind was clearer than it had been the previous night, tense but calm. He took picture after picture in fine spirits and looking forward to the end of the day: a portrait for an identity card, another for work, and a third for a passport; then one card with the picture of a girl with her hair up, fantasising she was a cover model, another with her resting her cheek in her hand with a romantic expression on her face, and a third with a male friend who pretended to place his hand on her shoulder, though his fingers hardly touched her.

  By six thirty Ahmed and Omar were heading Downtown to the head office of the Freedom newspaper.

  ‘Are you sure what you’re going to do is OK?’

  ‘Stop worrying. Don’t make me nervous as well.’

  ‘The guy’s no pushover. He must have begun to take steps; he won’t sleep on this. Look!’

  They were outside the building, in front of which stood a police truck and two officers studded with stars and eagles.

  ‘Galal moved very quickly indeed,’ said Ahmed.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘Keep walking. Let’s go to Tahrir.’

  The Tahrir Café: a large coffee shop at whose centre was a swarm of khirtiya more numerous than locusts. Khirtiya were tourist escorts without licences or certificates. They befriended the tourists for the duration of their stay, haggling on their behalf, offering trips to tourist sites, buying mementos from the bazaars, or even genuine antiques if the client was a fan of pharaonic relics, providing alcohol, drugs and sex, if needs be, and chaperoning and sleeping with female tourists who had travelled unaccompanied. Everything the tourist lusted after was available: no problem so long as he payed, no matter how strange or perverted his requests may seem. They also took commissions from bazaar traders, restaurants, hotels and the taxi drivers that the tourist hired. Even the least competent among them spoke four languages.

  The café was heaving with them and with their tourists, languages mingling like a meeting at the United Nations.

  Ahmed and Omar looked out of place as they sat sipping tea on the far left of the café.

  ‘See? Didn’t I tell you?’ said Omar. ‘The man’s no fool.’

  ‘I was expecting that.’

  ‘You should forget about this business with the phone.’

  ‘I don’t want him to get comfortable and relax. He has to feel that whoever’s messing with him is more powerful than him and the people protecting him. He needs to feel threatened for the first time in his life. Got the photo?’

  ‘Got it. What are you going to do?’

  ‘Wait here for me.’

  As Ahmed stood up, Omar grabbed his hand. ‘Ahmed, there are police involved; don’t do anything crazy. Just tell me what you’re going to do.’

  ‘Have you got a handkerchief?’

  Omar took one out of his pocket and handed it to Ahmed.

  ‘Pay for the tea and cross over to the Qasr el-Nil side of the street and wait there. Keep your eye on me.’

  Taking the photograph and the handkerchief, Ahmed started wandering serenely away while Omar left the café for the other side of the street. Ahmed reached a phone booth a good distance away from the café, took out his Menatel card and inserted it in the phone. He dialled Galal’s number as he wiped the photo free of fingerprin
ts and put it in a small white envelope. He heard the phone ring four times before Galal’s voice came down the line.

  ‘Hello?’

  Ahmed roughened his tone. ‘Evening. Galal Mursi?’

  ‘Who is this?’ Galal said sharply.

  ‘I didn’t know this would be so difficult for you. An exclusive is delivered to your doorstep like a shelled almond and if you publish it your pictures won’t see the light of day. Why does it need to get out of hand and have lots of people get involved? You’re only harming yourself.’

  ‘For your information, what you’re doing is going to get you screwed. A word of advice: run. Run with all your strength because if I find you, you can’t imagine how much pain you’ll feel. I …’

  He fell silent, cutting short his speech as though someone was giving him instructions, then resumed, ‘Or we could make a deal.’

  Ahmed saw straight through this. ‘There’s going to be no deal between you and me.’

  ‘Let’s meet and talk. Perhaps we can find you a nice little earner. Don’t be an idiot. I don’t have the authority to run difficult stories like this.’

  The sentence went unheard. The receiver rested atop the public phone, the line left open. Beneath it lay a white envelope and the lighter he had taken from him at the casino. Ahmed, meanwhile, was crossing the street to the pavement opposite the café to meet Omar.

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  At that very moment flashing blue lights appeared in Qasr el-Nil Street, the sound of sirens speeding closer until they emerged in Tahrir Square, driving against the traffic and pulling over by the phone booth. The very one that Ahmed had abandoned minutes before. A group of officers got out and spread through the café as others began examining the phone booth. One of them picked up the envelope and lighter.

  ‘Just as I thought: the phone was tapped. Let’s go.’

  ‘Another minute and we would have been goners. God destroy your house!’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ahmed, punching him and pointing at a taxi. ‘It’s already a wreck.’

  The taxi moved off while Ahmed stared from the back wind-screen, following what was going on. A high-ranking officer, the kind draped in eagles and swords, snatched the envelope from a youthful captain and opened it, just as a car pulled over and Galal Mursi scrambled out. His hands were moving in agitation as he spoke to the officer, gripping him by the elbow and leading him out of the lamplight.