Keystone (25 page)

Café du Corail was a French-style
affair that, like many in Cairo, harked of a different era. George imagined
that it hadn’t changed in a hundred years, and by the looks of it neither had
its clientele.

Whilst a lot
of Cairo seemed to be constantly re-modelling itself with building sites that
never seemed to end, many of the older areas still remained.

The great
marketplace of Khan el-Khalili was one of the most famous; a sprawling,
maze-like network of narrow streets, the awnings of open shop-fronts reaching
across the cobbled alleyways, drawing in endless streams of lobster-faced
tourists with bum-bags. There, the bartering started three times higher than
anywhere else, though few were tempted to shop around too much, lest the tour
bus leave without them.

Café du Corail
was
not
in Khan el-Khalili. It was on
the other side of the busy main street via a dank-looking footbridge, away from
the kitsch, in what the tourist-guides referred to as the
local market.
To say it had a different atmosphere was to take
understatement to the extreme. It was practically impossible to walk in
el-Khalili without being offered something, or if you were a woman, without
being propositioned.
Here,
in
contrast, if you didn’t speak Arabic, or didn’t know exactly what you wanted,
it was surprisingly difficult to buy anything at all.

On the subject
of price, all that needed to be said was that people bought in the local
market, and sold on el-Khalili.

But the
biggest difference, and the exact reason why George and Gail liked it so much,
was that the local market was, indeed, where you found true Cairenes.
El-Khalili had its charm, it was bright and colourful and full of happy smiling
people who spoke English, Spanish and a dozen other tourist languages. But here,
you were actually
in
Cairo, not in a
tourist-sustained bubble.

To George, the
Café now provided a quiet
shai
served
without a smile by a man whose interpersonal skills extended only to waving the
flies away from his face. A few minutes later a water-pipe, or shisha, was set
down beside him, hot coals were placed above the tinfoil wrap on the top, and
the long pipe hooked onto the little lid that covered it. A small plastic
packet containing a single-use mouthpiece was placed on the table.

George sat
just inside the entrance and waited. He had chosen the café as he was sure no
tourists ever went there, and as such he was certain that it would be the last
place anyone would look for an Englishman; Martín Antunez had been quite
specific that secrecy was highly important.

However, his
main reason for choosing the Café du Corail was that he always went there with
Gail when they visited Egypt. If she
was
in trouble, she would see him there, he was sure of it.

“Mr Turner?”

He looked up
and saw the man in the doorway; he looked exactly as he had imagined, with the
exception that his skin was not pale as he expected a Frenchman’s to be, but
olive-brown instead. Even George would have admitted that he was handsome.

“Good
afternoon,” he stood up and offered his hand limply. He felt drained, both
emotionally and physically.

It was eagerly
accepted, and they both sat down at the round table. His guest eyed the tea,
and George made a signal to the nonplussed waiter, who brought a second cup,
along with a second mouthpiece for the shisha. Martín served himself from the
small teapot.
 

“So you are Mr
Antunez?” George said, looking at the man intently.

“Yes, please
call me Martín.”

“You don’t
sound French.”

“I’m Spanish,”
he explained.

“And how do
you know my wife?” Despite the civilised surroundings, he couldn’t help but
sound bitter and accusing.

“Mr Turner, I
am on your side,” Martín defended himself.

“I wasn’t
aware that there were
sides
?”

“I’m sorry, Mr
Turner,” he held up his hands. “I forget that while you are coming into this
cold, I have already been involved in this for several months now.”

George gave a
short laugh. “You can say that again.
Cold
is definitely the word.”

“I don’t
really know your wife; we met briefly many years ago at one of her lectures in
London.” He had a sincere tone that George found quite disarming, despite his
bad mood. “I have not spoken to her since I asked her to sign a copy of her
book.” He placed the book on the table and offered the inscription on the
inside of the cover as proof.

George looked
at the inscription and recognised his wife’s handwriting. It proved nothing;
she had probably signed hundreds of books in the last few years. “Why are you
looking for her now?”

“As I
explained over the phone: because of the finds on Mars. I work for the European
Space Agency. We released the pictures to the press.”

“And you want
to speak to my wife because the Mars finds are like those she found in Egypt,
like all the other reporters. All you want is a statement, and when you
couldn’t find my wife, you thought you’d get hold of me instead. The scoop’s
almost as good, isn’t it?
Egyptologist
goes missing – husband has no idea
?” he said scornfully.

Martín shook
his head fiercely. “No, I am not a reporter. I am a scientist. And I do not
want a story, although I am sure my boss would.” He added the last statement
almost as an afterthought. “My Agency uncovered the images from Mars and
released them to the press because someone involved in the Mars mission was
covering them up. Without us, they would never have been seen. We believed that
it would be important to speak with your wife to seek more information about
the symbols, to understand how they came to be on Mars, to see if she could
help unravel the mystery of why this is being covered up.”

“Except you
were too late?” George asked.

“Unfortunately,
yes. It is reasonable to assume that whoever is responsible for the cover up
would also want to stop anyone from contacting your wife, and would therefore
seek to have her kidnapped.”

“Or murdered,”
George said. The thought had crossed his mind a few times in the past day but
he always pushed it away quickly. This time, he felt a huge weight descend on
his stomach and his eyes dropped involuntarily.

“No, I don’t
think so, at least not yet,” Martín reassured him. “She knows more about her
field than anyone, I expect she is as useful to them as she would be to us.”

The man’s
belief did little to settle him. “And who are these people who are supposed to
have kidnapped my wife?”

“We don’t know
that much, but we do know that they are most likely to be based in the United
States. It’s even possible, though I think highly improbable, that they are
working from within NASA.”

“You’re saying
NASA kidnapped my wife?” George said in disbelief.

“No, not at
all. At the most they may be members of NASA who work for someone else also.
NASA is as innocent as the other Space Agencies in this cover up.”

George sat in
silence for a while before letting out a long sigh.

He hadn’t
ordered the shisha, but neither had he had the energy nor presence of mind to
refuse it. Maybe the owner had assumed from the look of him that he needed it.
Now, he found himself unwrapping the mouthpiece and attaching it to the pipe. He
looked at it vacantly for some time before lifting it to his lips and sucking
on it tentatively, until the water bubbled gently and the glass chamber near
his feet filled with thick white smoke. He then took a long, slow inhale, the
satisfying crackle of the coals under the lid coming slightly before the thick,
warm apple-smoke filled his mouth, throat and lungs. He exhaled slowly,
pointing his nostrils towards the ceiling like a curious dragon.

It had been a
hellish twenty-four hours. He’d spent the previous evening sick with worry in
his hotel room, without a word from the police. In the morning, he’d visited
Captain Kamal, who had done his best to outdo himself on the previous day’s
unpleasantness scale. The afternoon so far had been no better, and now this
Spaniard was telling him his wife had been kidnapped by some unknown
conspirators.

From what he
understood, shisha was simply tobacco soaked in apple; there was nothing
druggy
about it. And yet it made him
sink into his chair. Only the fact that he couldn’t find Gail remained clear in
his mind.

And here
, he thought,
is a man who’s trying to help find Gail
.
He slipped his mouthpiece out and passed the pipe over. Martín accepted it
nervously, fumbling the mouthpiece from its wrapper and taking a quick suck of
the pipe. He didn’t seem to enjoy it, and managed to hook it back on the shisha
lid clumsily.

“Did you tell
all this to the police?” George asked.

“Not the
entire story, no,” he said. “But I relayed my fears that many people may want
to talk to your wife, and that she may have been taken. The Egyptian police
officer seemed very interested in my theory.”

At that moment
George’s phone rang, vibrating its way along the metal table. He picked it up,
listened in silence for a long minute, then put it down gently.
 
His fingers were like lead as they released
the device and his hand slumped down on the table beside it. He felt his whole
body sag like a wet teabag. He’d felt despondent before the shisha, numb during
and now, after the call, he didn’t know how he felt. Helpless, still. More
numb.

Empty
.

Now there was
nothing. No shisha, no
shai
, no
el-Khalili.

No kidnapping
.

He closed his
eyes and felt his bottom lip begin to tremble.

“Mr Turner?” Martín
said, almost whispering.

No kidnapping.

He wanted to
get up and leave, but his limbs were unresponsive, dead. He wanted to run, to
jump back in time, to stop Gail, to call her, to hold her. To have anything but
this.

He could
vaguely sense the Spaniard touching his arm, looking at him, asking him
something. It didn’t matter anymore.

He knew where
Gail was, now.

Captain Kamal was waiting when he
arrived at the police station in a daze. He didn’t accept the Egyptian’s
outstretched hand and was quickly ushered into the building and immediately
down a short flight of stairs.

“Thank you for
coming,” Kamal said gently.

His attitude
was now entirely different, almost as if he felt sorry for the Englishman,
possibly even slightly nervous.

George could
barely bring himself to grunt unintelligibly in reply.

He was led
past an open lift and through a long corridor flanked by half a dozen
windowless doors on either side. The passage was well lit, leading to a set of
hospital-style double-doors. George did not need to be able to understand the
small sign in Arabic; a general sense of foreboding told him he was about to
enter the station morgue.

Kamal held the
left-hand door open and he walked in.

He stopped in
his tracks as he laid eyes on the row of trolleys along one wall. About half
were covered by thin sheets, and it was obvious to him that they concealed human
bodies. Only one, at the far end of the room, was of a shape that could be his
wife. With all his might he told himself that it couldn’t possibly be Gail, but
deep down inside an overpowering dread informed him that it could be no one but
her.
 
His wife was surely under that
sheet, but if he didn’t get any closer, it somehow made it less real.

Kamal had
continued forward into the morgue, and was now standing beside the trolley. He
looked back at George, waiting patiently for him to follow.

“Where did you
find her?” he said without moving from the doorway. “Gail wouldn’t have been
far from the Museum or the Professor’s house.” His voice was monotonous, going
through the motions, dodging the fact that lay ahead of him, cold.

“There is a
series of canals running to the west of the city. Some are but a trickle of
water, as Cairo nowadays gets most of its supply from the purification plants
to the north. The canal is used mostly by vagrants. We received an anonymous
call some hours ago that a body had been found under a bridge.” He looked down
at the still-covered body between them. “It’s a long way, but still within
walking distance of the Museum, Mr Turner. We need you to officially identify
the body.”

George walked
forwards slowly. As he approached the trolley, Captain Kamal gently peeled back
the cover to reveal the black hair and white skin of a woman in her late
thirties to early forties. Her skin was undamaged and had a frozen,
plastic-like quality. Her eyes were closed, but as he looked down at her lifeless
corpse, George imagined her looking back at him, her infectious smile lighting
his life. What had previously been a weight on his stomach lurched
uncontrollable, welling upwards, no longer held back. He stroked her hair,
touched his cheek to hers, and as he held her lifeless body tight, wept.

His tears were
confirmation enough for Captain Kamal, who after barely a minute moved him away
from the table quickly and moved the sheet back across the woman’s face.

“How?” George
asked eventually, trying to control his voice. It seemed so wrong that Gail
should be lying lifelessly in front of him. So wrong because she was such a
good person, and could never hurt anyone herself. So wrong because he hadn’t
had the chance to say goodbye. So wrong because he loved her, because he lived
to make her life perfect, and her death only meant that he had failed. Gail
couldn’t
be dead.

Kamal
hesitated. “It’s not easy to explain, Mr Turner. I am very sorry for your
loss.”

George looked
up at the officer. “How did it happen, Captain?” he asked more forcefully.

“She was
stabbed several times in the lower abdomen with a knife, probably a
switchblade. They are unfortunately very common in the city. We believe that
she was robbed,” he said.

“What was she
doing in the canal in the first place? Why would she want to go anywhere near
it?” George raised his voice. Everything seemed to be wrong. Gail was dead, and
all because she was wandering around some silly canal? It didn’t make sense to
him.

“Your wife was
found clutching several pages of torn paper.” He looked nervously at the
grief-stricken man before him. “The book they were ripped from was – and
probably still is – extremely valuable. It was part of a collection of similar
books that were taken from Professor al-Misri’s office yesterday evening.”

George felt
the hairs rise on his forearms and on the back of his neck. He rose to his full
height, towering over the policeman.

“There is no
easy way to say this, Mr Turner. However we believe that your wife took these
books from the Professor’s office.”

“Are you’re
suggesting that she killed him, too?” George challenged him.

“Your wife had
a strong motive to take the books: her career was at risk and the books would
have offered financial security. We cannot be certain at the moment that it was
intentional, as he fell and hit his head on the side of his desk. However
shortly after the incident CCTV footage shows your wife running from the museum
holding the stolen items.”

“You can
actually see
Gail
doing that?”

“There were no
other women in the museum that night, Mr Turner,” he said. “We can only assume
that she did not know where to go from there; she probably did not plan the
crimes beforehand, and so simply ran in the approximate direction of the
airport. She will have stumbled upon the canal around midnight, and been robbed
herself shortly afterwards.”

George
couldn’t believe what he was hearing. To find out that his wife had been
murdered was bad enough, but to be told moments later that she had robbed and
killed one of her closest friends and colleagues was simply ludicrous.

“Are you
serious? No, it’s not possible. None of what you’re saying makes sense!”

The officer
gave an uncomfortable smile and tilted his head sympathetically. “I’m afraid
that we have all of the evidence we need, Mr Turner. Your identification of the
corpse was the final detail, and as far as I am concerned the case is now
closed. Of course, we are still looking for your wife’s murderer, but that is
being handled by a separate department, who have your contact details.”

George’s mind
was a mess of grief, confusion and anger. He looked down at the now covered
body of his wife, and then back at Kamal. The forced smile, a dismal attempt at
sympathy,
 
was still painted on the
Egyptian’s face, his head tilted in that patronising manner. His account of the
incredible story had left George speechless; there was only one thing he could
think to do.

He wasn’t a
violent man, by any means, but he felt a sudden surge of adrenaline as his fist
hit the officer so hard on the chin that the small man literally spun round on
his heels and fell over.

By the time
Captain Kamal was back on his feet, nursing his chin, George Turner had already
left the morgue, with the doors swinging closed behind him.

Kamal fished
in his pocket for his phone and toyed with the sheet covering the body as he
dialled a number with his free hand. As the phone rang, he pulled the sheet
back to reveal the frozen face beneath. He shook his head to himself. Someone
answered the phone.

“It’s Captain
Kamal. Mr Turner has just left.”

A short pause.

“Yes, it’s
done.”

He snapped the
phone shut and tossed the sheet back over the face before marching quickly out
of the morgue.