The Cairo Diary (27 page)

“For those who can afford it,” Jeremy couldn't stop himself adding.

They each selected a cue and Jeremy began the game. Jezebel sat down on a velour-covered bench, her glass in her hand.

“Do you frequent a club?” Keoraz asked after several minutes' play.

“Every one in the street. Every place where there's a billiard table, a partner, and an invitation.”

Keoraz leaned over the green baize. “Join us sometime at the Gezira Sporting Club, you'll have an opportunity to carry off plenty of presumptuous scalps.”

“I shall think about it.”

Keoraz took aim, sliding his cue back and forth across his hand, his face stern. He struck the ball and observed it as it moved across the table.

“Why did you create this foundation?”

Keoraz, who clearly had not been expecting this question, abandoned the rest of his turn and turned questioning eyes on Jeremy.

“Why?” he repeated with unexpected seriousness. “What kind of man do you think I am? A miserly, inflexible blackguard? Or a philanthropist, hiding under the appearance of a sour-tempered businessman? Oh, don't take the trouble to answer, I can see from your face what your opinion would be. And you want to know, Mr. Matheson? You would have only half the truth. I am both, Detective. Like everyone on this planet. I am neither white nor black, merely colorless and striving not to lose my way by being blinded by one color or another. As I move along, I take on the hue beside me and falter before I recover my balance. And so on…”

Jeremy walked around the table to gauge the best angle before playing. “Not everyone in the world is necessarily gray, if I may say so,” he commented.

“That is not what I said. We have no color, we take on the color of our thoughts, our actions. And those are as changeable and diversified as a painter's palette.”

Keoraz offered Jeremy the billiard rest, but he refused with a brief shake of the head.

“My foundation is all I can do to say to this country that I like it, Detective, in my own way. I have so much money that I can no longer count it; what could I do to say thank you to this city? Take care of its offspring, the men of tomorrow. In the Cairo tradition, I set up a teaching foundation, a little like the
waqf
*
that made it possible to build those immense fountains one sees in the streets, with a room upstairs in which to teach the Koran. The difference is that my foundation is slanted toward general learning, and is open to those few families that agree to send their daughters at the same time as their sons.”

“So the formidable Mr. Keoraz offers culture to the children of Egypt!” Jeremy declared with emphasis. “Admirable!”

“You don't believe it, do you? You are one of those skeptics who want to know what I am concealing behind this act of compassion and generosity, which is somewhat improbable coming from a hardheaded millionaire businessman. I say it again, here and now: there is nothing. Nothing more egotistical than a feeling of lightness when I get up in the morning. You would say that I created this foundation to buy back my conscience, but I say that it has given me a form of serenity—it is a matter of one's point of view, I would imagine. I am not the demon some wish to see in me. As I told you: I am similar to all men, neither completely bad nor really good.”

“And yet bad men exist. Monsters capable of the worst atrocities.”

Keoraz held his cue in front of him, vertically, and leaned his hands on the top of the heel, about level with his breastbone. “That is the question, my dear fellow. The rift of evil.”

Jeremy took up a playing position. “The rift of evil?” he asked. “I've never heard of it.”

“The rift between those who think that monsters exist, and those for whom Man is born good, or at least neutral, and becomes what he is by dint of his experiences. Is evil an entity or a corruption of our society?”

“Rousseau?”

Keoraz winked at the detective. “Very good. But not just Rousseau. The rift of evil is a question that has been haunting our race since the dawn of civilization. Are we the fruit of our experiences or are we born predisposed to those experiences? Are the worst criminals all that way because they have experienced the worst torments in their development to manhood, or is it because they were born with this inclination toward violence?”

Jeremy delayed his shot long enough to ask a question. “Don't recent thinkers on the subject of the mind say that it is the child, through its development, who constitutes the foundation of our character? A child who is persecuted at school by the other children could perhaps develop a sort of … defense mechanism, hating the other children without any distinction among them and—”

“Tut-tut-tut, Detective, I must stop you there. The question is not about what that situation might engender in the head of a child, but ‘why did we arrive at this situation?' Why did this child arouse the anger and hatred of his comrades? Through his misdeeds, his wicked words, or his calumny, I suppose. Why did he have this basic attitude?”

Keoraz had entered into the state of earthly detachment experienced by great orators, who are captivating as much because of their charisma as the emotion they put into their words. He continued: “Is evil an affectation that we contract through having lived, like a sickness of the soul, in a way similar to melancholia, or is it that mysterious force that inhabits our cells from the first sparks of our creation? Two distinct visions of the essence of evil. That is the rift of evil. An eternal debate on the existence of good and evil, or on the colorless and chameleonlike nature of Man.”

Jeremy jabbed his cue forward and missed his shot.

“Well, well, Jeremy, is this debate about our nature awakening some kind of contradiction in your mind?” teased Jezebel, momentarily casting off her haughtiness.

The detective swapped places with the millionaire, ignoring Jezebel. “I confess I do not know on which side of this rift of evil I should stand, I … I have from time to time observed the terrible nature of certain individuals among us. I do not say whether we are born evil or become that way; I am very afraid that the two are not so far apart. But I know that existence carries this evil within it. And that even the best people can sometimes topple over onto the other side, contaminated without hope of remission. Man is capable of anything.”

The tone he used and the expression on his face commanded Jezebel's respect. “You talk as if you were a victim of this transformation yourself.”

There was no hint of a question in what she said, nothing but a troubled observation.

“In a way.”

“Are all detectives burdened with this wound?” she asked, almost tenderly.

“This has nothing to do with my job.”

Keoraz understood all at once. He laid his cue on the edge of the table. “The war…,” he said.

Jeremy raised his eyes to look at him. Keoraz went into more detail, “You are of the age, and in the physical and intellectual condition to have served during the Great War.”

Jeremy ran his tongue over his lips. He looked around for his glass. Jezebel got up and brought it to him without a word.

“It is in extreme conditions that a man reveals his true nature, is that not a well-known fact?” he said, taking a drink. “From experience, I say that evil is as much an essence in the cosmos as a fever in our society.”

Keoraz approached, carrying a crystal decanter, and topped Jeremy's glass.

“However atrocious they may be, the barbarous actions in time of war are, alas, completely in context,” suggested the millionaire.

Jeremy drank again, taking two long swallows. “The context is a pretext. What I am talking about doesn't concern the killings against the Germans. But what happened within a unit. Among British
gentlemen.
”

Jezebel folded her arms across her chest.

“During that fearsome era of organized slaughter, I was present at the most infamous persecution. A group of perverted NCOs, deranged by spending too much time in the blood and the mud. And a young soldier who was too naïve. Young and handsome like a beach after the tide has gone out, leaving it with not a scar upon it.”

His moist eyes trembled under the light from the billiard table. “I saw them persecute him. Turn him into their whipping boy, by turns a means of physical, moral, and sexual release. He was spared nothing. Nothing. It lasted eight months. And between each torture: the battles, the pulp of flesh pulverized in the air by the din of the guns, the agonized cries of men who'd been playing cards three hours earlier, and the only point of reference that arid land, a field plowed by weapons and gorged with blood, where nothing grew but the roots of despair.”

“Didn't anyone intervene to save this young man?” demanded Jezebel indignantly, her voice a whisper filled with emotion.

“We were cut off from the rest of the troops, in an isolated post, commanded by an officer too blinded by dignity to allow himself to believe that his men could do such a thing. During the war, the chain of command was the only constant that could be respected. You could die of hunger, cold, or bullets, but you could never call your hierarchy into question. The punishment would have been the firing squad. And the torturers were all noncommissioned officers. Picking a fight with them would have been tantamount to suicide.”

Without a word, Jeremy picked up the decanter and poured himself another glass. “One day, a man—his name was Dickey—intervened. He couldn't bear the young soldier's tears anymore. Seeing three of the four NCOs approaching to lay into their ‘object,' Dickey got up to bar their way. He was away three days in the hospital, and when he came back, the NCOs gave him a hard life. He died a week later, in a trench. From then on, the unit chose to close its eyes and ears when necessary. The majority of the men had at least a fiancée, if not a wife and children, and they wanted to go home. Death was already too constant a visitor to the trenches and the barbed wire for them to go out of their way to provoke it. And in time of war, it is easier to close your eyes.”

“And what about you?” inquired Keoraz.

“I waited until it passed.”

“How did it end?” asked Jezebel, troubled.

“In blood.” Jeremy finished his drink, gazing into emptiness. “One day,” he went on, “the young soldier refused to submit. It was one time too many, I imagine. The NCOs fixed their bayonets and amused themselves with him. One by one, the other soldiers emerged from the tent. The torture lasted several hours. The sheets were covered with blood afterward. This time, the torturers couldn't hide all the horror, and the unfortunate was sent to the hospital. It appears he said nothing for several days, not one word, not one cry of pain. He just shat blood. With a swollen face and an enormous gash on his chest.”

In the silence that followed, Keoraz lit a cigar without taking his eyes off the detective. Jezebel wept.

Her incandescent green eyes were covered by a veil of tears; she pursed her lips tightly to hold in the sobs as best she could.

“What happened to the NCOs?” asked Keoraz.

“They were sentenced to death by court-martial. But in the time it took to convict them, they had decimated half the unit in suicidal attacks.”

“And the young soldier?”

“I don't know. He died or as good as died, I would imagine. Unless the evil entered him by dint of his having been confronted by it every day. Whatever happened, his life was shattered.”

Jeremy swung around toward Jezebel, who gazed at him unblinkingly, the tears rolling down as far as the lines of her lips, where they gathered into a glistening pearl.

What did she see in him now? What image was drawn up by the mention of his name, of their shared memories? He who had always lied when she asked him questions about his past at that time, about his service in the war, who had disguised this truth behind tirelessly repeated lies until he had convinced himself they were true.

“You see, Mr. Keoraz,” Jeremy said in a voice that was abnormally low and trembling, “evil men do exist, men who are capable of the worst things. There may be those who become that way, victims of evil who carry around their pain like ghosts unable to find absolution. In any event, there are people who do evil without fighting against it, without apologies, without any inner struggle; on the contrary, they rejoice in it. Those people are monsters.”

He leaned forward to hand Jezebel a handkerchief from his jacket pocket. Without even looking at his audience, he continued in the same tone, laden with anger and suffering: “And those men do not deserve any trial; all they deserve is death. Only death.”

*   *   *

His thighs bulging from the effort, Azim climbed the last of the building's stairs and finally reached the roof by means of the ladder.

Khalil was waiting for him and stretched out a hand. “Well? What did you see? Was it really the … the demon?”

Azim collapsed onto the carpet, reaching out for the water jar. Khalil poured some out for him to drink.

“False alarm,” grunted Azim between two gulps.

“But … but the signal…”

“A man who was too jumpy, who grabbed the lamp as soon as he spotted a shape moving strangely. It was a lame man, not a beast from Hell.”

Disappointment appeared on the young man's face. “Do you think we'll really see it?” he asked.

“I don't know, Khalil, my plan rests on a crazy probability. The
ghul
has been seen in this area several times in the past few weeks; if we are lucky, then maybe.… Come on, rest now, I shall keep watch and you can relieve me for the last few hours.”

Khalil lay down in one of the hammocks and swiftly sank into an agitated sleep.

Azim wrapped himself up in a blanket and sat himself at the corner of the building, overlooking the torpor of the district. The curtain of stars lit up Cairo's anarchic silhouette.