The Cairo Diary (37 page)

“All right, and how long did you stay awake before you fell asleep? Hmm? How long? Two minutes? Five? It doesn't matter, he'd have waited, and his famous superfast Bentley would enable him to make up for lost time and reach Azim before me.”

Jezebel pushed away the detective, watched in alarm by the other travelers who had witnessed the scene. “Francis is not a criminal!”

Jeremy reached into his jacket and took out the old papyrus that had been found in Azim's clothing. “And your husband adores the history of Cairo. He is at the head of a bank that finances a number of archaeological searches; he must have learned of the existence of old underground tunnels, where he hides his ‘ghoul.' Soon I shall have all the proof I need against him.”

Jezebel was no longer listening to him.

The streetcar slowed down. A more and more compact crowd filled the pavements and the middle of the road for a hundred yards. Eventually the car stopped and the doors opened.

Outside, in the gathering darkness, the demonstrators were mingling with a tide of curious onlookers, young sensation-seekers, and anti-English slogans sounded alongside those extolling a strong Egypt, governed by the people's representatives. The current regime was being castigated for its indulgence toward the British occupiers.

Everyone was walking quickly, shouting as they moved back up the boulevard.

Jezebel slipped between two groups and melted into the masses. “Jezebel!” shouted Jeremy. “Jezebel!”

He pushed away the bodies that stood in his way, zigzagging through this forest of flesh, shouts, and growing hostility.

Arms were raised to protest, and mouths directed aggressive reprimands at him.

Jeremy struggled not to lose sight of his target. Jezebel's black hair rippled to the rhythm of her random movements. Jeremy had the impression that her long hair escaped all the laws of earthly attraction; it was as if it floated in water. Jezebel had slipped in among the procession.

Suddenly, a furious face occupied his entire field of vision.

An old Arab, who started insulting him in the language of the prophet Mohammad.

Jeremy pushed him out of the way without gentleness, to regain sight of the enchanting apparition. He sought her in vain.

Dozens of heads, even more turbans, fezes, tarbooshes, but no more Jezebel with her accentuated movements.

Jeremy was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe. Perspiration was running down the length of his spine. All the protests, the braying, the yelling whirled around his ears, forming a great merry-go-round of confusion and suffocation.

Windows shattered, shopfronts were smashed in by bricks before collapsing with a clatter. The din of the malcontents rumbled like a wave, spreading toward the back of the human snake.

There was a bend in the street. A fabulous halo of lapis-lazuli blue rippled across the fronts of the buildings. Their stone was covered with a luminous, electric blue skin, moving like water on fire, striped with red veins, and in the panes of the bow windows volcanoes were reflected, spitting out bubbling sapphire lava.

Negotiating the bend, Jeremy was stunned to discover what was suffusing the whole street with this extraordinary brightness.

All the lampposts had been decapitated, and the gas was shooting several yards into the air, burning skywards in a flaming column, a real artery of buzzing fire, of a magnetic blue that changed to orange at the summit and whistled furiously.

Then he spotted Jezebel, twenty yards ahead, pushing away two men who were ranting and raving at her. One of them stepped behind her and caught her by the hair.

Enraged, Jeremy shoved aside the onlookers in front of him, cleaving the crowd.

Jezebel started to scream as she was being manhandled.

A youth, excited by the general revolt, recognized Jeremy as one of the British occupiers and stepped into his path, determined to prevent him going any farther.

Over his shoulder, the Englishman saw that Jezebel had been dragged to one side, and slapped twice.

His fist clenched and dealt the youth a stinging blow to the liver. He bent double, then fell on all fours, expelling all the air from his lungs. Jeremy wasted no more time, and stepped over him.

The first individual did not see him loom up and was immediately felled by a powerful blow between the shoulder blades. He fell forward and broke his nose and several teeth on the pavement. The other let go of Jezebel and ran forward to grab the detective by the throat. Jeremy sidestepped him and raised his knee, striking the man hard between the thighs.

The blow hit home but also unbalanced Jeremy. He saw the street spin around and only had time to put his hands forward and cushion his fall. He blinked. The alcohol was no longer having any effect on his senses. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed that his adversary, who was lying just under his own legs, was attempting to get to his feet.

Jeremy raised his thigh and with all his strength brought down his heel on the troublemaker's chin. Something broke under the violence of the impact.

Jeremy grabbed hold of the metal grille in front of the building and used it to haul himself to his feet. Jezebel shrank back, afraid.

The detective spun around and saw a band of angry men bearing down on him, led by the youth who was still holding his belly.

Hatred was written all over their faces.

Six were approaching him, and there would soon be ten of them.

They were going to break him into pieces. Him, and then Jezebel.

Jeremy unfastened his holster and brandished his gun.

“Halt!”
he roared.

The group paused in its march, while the hundreds of others passed by, speeding up their pace, heading for the front of the assembly, barely paying any attention to what was being played out between this couple of Westerners and a faction of their own people. The outcome of the confrontation was in no doubt.

Emboldened by the weight of numbers, the youth rushed at Jeremy.

Jeremy lowered his arms.

The lampposts poured out their sparkling torrent above their heads.

The crowd chanted its nationalistic litany.

There were hundreds of passersby, and they were almost running.

The shot from a .45-caliber weapon barely made a sound in the general chaos, stifled as it was by the chest of the youth who was at its business end when Jeremy pulled the trigger.

The boy's eyes changed all at once. The vengeful fever turned into incomprehension. Jeremy saw no pain there, only disorientation, and then fear.

The youth died in the grip of terror. He collapsed, his eyes searching for some possible escape, some comfort, but already he saw nothing more than his own abyss, which was progressively engulfing him.

He closed his eyes, refusing to drown in nothingness like this, and was shaken by one final convulsion. His hands flopped limply to the ground and began to turn cold.

The other men who accompanied the boy watched him die, then turned their eyes on Jeremy. The detective realized that they were going to charge. His weapon mattered little; they were going to rush him, in a single movement, to submerge him and make him pay for what he had done.

A din grew louder from the front of the tumultuous procession. A roar that was transformed into terror.

Shots rang out between the façades of the buildings. Sharp and metallic. Rifle shots, Jeremy guessed.

The army was charging.

Already the demonstrators were running in the opposite direction, terrified.

Jeremy turned his attentions back to the danger that directly affected him. Several individuals were approaching him, looking menacing.

He checked that Jezebel was definitely behind him, and put his finger back on the trigger. Panic was flowing back from the front of the human mass, all the way back to where they stood.

More than half of the shadows around them were now running in the opposite direction.

The rifle shots rang out again.

Jeremy saw two silhouettes sidestep the fugitives to go around him and attempt to take him from behind.

A third charged at him, full-out, just avoiding the angry mob of fugitives.

Jeremy could not fire; there was movement everywhere. Any bullet would go through several bodies before reaching his attacker.

Suddenly, the human tide became so dense and so violent that everyone was carried away by the tidal wave.

Unable to resist without falling and being trampled underfoot, Jeremy allowed himself to be carried along, pushed, and propelled by the power of this wave of flesh.

His attackers were swept along just like him, dispersed, moving their legs as much as they could to remain at the surface.

The tide burst as it reached a square, plunging its offshoots into the narrow streets that opened off it in all directions.

Jeremy threw himself into the recessed doorway of a house and waited for the main body of the herd to pass. He looked for Jezebel among the faces.

And he found her, on the other side, terrified but safe and sound. He lost her as she swiftly left a busy thoroughfare to escape the mobs along an adjacent street.

Jeremy threw his head back against the wall, and let out a long breath.

The worst was yet to come.

Tonight was going to be the longest and the most sinister of Cairo nights.

45

Children's laughter awakened Marion.

Her tongue was coated, and her head filled with a throbbing pain.

She no longer knew where she was. The room was going around.

In the rail car … I'm with Jeremy, in the rail—

No, she was in Cairo. She'd been attacked during the riot.

She remembered a shape that looked like death, pursuing her. No! She was the one chasing it.

The diary.

Mont-Saint-Michel.

Marion remembered. She was in her place. In her little house.

For a moment she no longer knew who she was. Her life had become transposed with the earlier life of Jezebel.

She was Marion.

She had got back the black book. Jeremy Matheson's private diary. And she had gone back up to the Salle des Chevaliers, more angry than worried. Someone had been playing games with her. Had she misheard that click in the lock? Was it in fact that of the postern door, or had the thief caused a diversion at the main door before running round to enter behind her back, so as to sneak the book away from her?

She had not found the answer. In the end it mattered little.

Then Marion had gone back down.

To see Béatrice; she'd needed to talk.

The shop was shut. Closed on Mondays. And nobody was in the apartment upstairs.

Marion had noticed Ludwig coming out of an adjacent street, and had flattened herself in the dusk to avoid him before going back to her place to take refuge. This was not the moment for him to come and whisper sweet nothings in her ear.

She stood there in the living room for five minutes, and then started crying. She was lost. Incapable of making the right decision. She'd found the telephone in her hand, while she punched in the number written on a card in her purse. The man from the DST.

She'd hung up before the first ring.

And paced up and down instead.

When her feet started hurting, she sat down and poured herself a gin and orange. Then another. And so on.

Her mind had grown calmer, and she had picked up the book to flick through it; and even before she meant to, she was reading what came next.

She fell asleep at the end of the riot, when Jezebel ran away.

Knocked out by the alcohol.

She had slept for two hours.

Now the children were making a din underneath her window.

Night had fallen. And there were no children on the Mount.

Marion blinked, very slowly, but did not get up.

She opened her mouth, and her lips came unstuck like chewing gum being peeled off linoleum.

She reached out to grab the top of the sofa and pulled to haul herself up. Her nose made contact with the cold glass of the bay window.

Down below, in the street, dozens of people were walking up towards the abbey, each at their own pace, the children in the lead.

The orchestral concert.

Marion had helped Sister Gabriela put up the flyers in the village square last Saturday afternoon.

She looked at her bare wrist and realized that she hadn't worn a watch since she arrived here. She found the time in the kitchen. Twenty past seven.

The concert was in less than an hour.

Marion had no desire to attend.

She wanted to be home. In her
real
home, in Paris. She wanted to go to bed in the evening and set her alarm clock for the following morning, the very same one that made her grumble at quarter to seven when she had to get up and go to work. She dreamed of being able to forget all this.

Why did somebody persecute her? Who?

Matheson's private diary lay upside down on the sofa, open at the point she had reached when she fell asleep.

It was impossible that there was any relationship between this diary and what had happened to her in Paris, the case of the suspicious political death. So whoever was pursuing her here simply wanted to get the book back. What was there in it to arouse such determination?

Marion picked it up.

There were only a few pages left to read.

And perhaps then, she would know.

She sighed with all her soul and sat down in front of the gin bottle.

The diary fell open on her thighs and the pages turned one after the other until they stopped, suspended in midair.

Marion pushed away the bottle of alcohol.

And returned to her place.

That night in Egypt, when the worst was yet to come.

46

Jeremy returned to the eastern districts, to see the dragoman he had engaged to find all those who had participated in the nocturnal vigil along with Azim.

Azim had discovered an old underground complex, in which the ghoul was hiding, somewhere under el-Gamaliya. He had brought back an old papyrus that identified the underground chambers in question as being in a part of the city between the Huisein mosque and the al-Azhar University. But Jeremy had still to find the entrance.