The Burning Gates (21 page)

‘Aram was the last in a long line of art collectors. His great-grandfather first bought this house the year the Suez Canal was opened.’

‘All of this is insured, I take it?’

‘Oh, it’s impossible to set a value on this collection in material terms.’

‘I’m sure there are a few disreputable people who wouldn’t mind trying.’

‘The room is secured. The windows and doors are heavily barred and there is an alarm system. The most valuable pieces are in a safe. Of course, the best deterrent is simply secrecy. Very few people know about this room.’

‘You mean he never showed it to anyone?’

‘Only to a select few,’ Jules smiled. ‘People whose reputation would prevent them from speaking freely of what they had seen.’

‘I take it that all these items were purchased legally.’

Jules gave a slight cough that might have been a laugh. ‘Well, that depends on how you define legally.’

‘How many ways are there?’

‘They were all acquired through legitimate purchase, I can assure you. Please, there’s no smoking in here.’ Jules paused before going on. ‘Naturally, there might be some debate as to how the seller came into possession of a particular piece in the first place. But the art world is full of such oddities.’

‘Not so odd,’ Makana said, strolling about the room. ‘Let’s talk about the not so legal pieces.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m on your side, Mr Jalal, or as good as. I know in this business you sometimes stray over the line. Kasabian more or less told me that himself. Pieces are traded with no questions asked. Lost masterpieces and priceless artefacts that simply disappeared one day from a museum somewhere.’

Jules blinked a few times. ‘What are you trying to suggest?’

‘We’re trying to find a reason why somebody wanted to torture and kill Kasabian, remember? He was tortured because someone wanted information. Now what kind of information could that be?’

‘I really don’t know what you are driving at.’ Jules gave a half-hearted laugh.

‘What was Kasabian dealing in? Either you tell me or we can call Inspector Okasha to join us. It’s up to you.’

‘Very well.’ Jules took a deep breath. ‘Items sometimes came to Aram, Mr Kasabian, by unconventional routes.’

‘Unconventional routes?’ Makana laughed. ‘You people have a high-grade talent for sliding around awkward truths. Go on.’

‘From time to time he would arrange extraordinary showings. Potential buyers would come, some flying in from the Gulf, or further afield. Aram adored these objects.’

‘How many people know about this room?’

‘Only Mr Kasabian, and myself of course. As I said, a few select buyers, friends.’

‘What about Na’il, does he know?’

Jules looked at Makana and nodded silently.

‘What exactly did Na’il do for Kasabian?’

‘Well, Kasabian used him when he needed something done.’

‘What kind of something?’

‘Putting pressure on someone, that kind of thing. He had contacts in the security forces. He knew people. He was very useful in that way.’

‘If he was so useful, why didn’t Kasabian use him to find Kadhim al-Samari?’

Restlessly, Jules began to twist the cord of his robe into knots.

‘Na’il got out of hand, didn’t he?’ asked Makana.

Jules nodded quickly. ‘He started getting ideas. He was asking for money, big money, in exchange for silence.’

‘Silence about what Kasabian was up to?’

‘I don’t really like to talk about this. I mean, especially here.’ He glanced around at the walls of Kasabian’s inner sanctuary.

Makana produced his telephone. ‘Perhaps we should invite Inspector Okasha to join us.’

‘Wait.’ Jules held up a hand. He rubbed his temples. ‘All right. Okay.’

‘What did Na’il have on Kasabian? Was it something in this room?’

‘I never liked the man.’ Jules scowled. ‘I tried to warn Aram but he just laughed. He said sometimes you need people like that to get their hands dirty for you.’

‘Then one day, Na’il saw an opportunity that he couldn’t resist.’

Jules hesitated and then relented. He moved Makana aside in order to reach a large glass cabinet filled with brass objects that looked African. The whole cabinet slid aside on wheels to reveal a section of wooden panelling. Jules pressed one side and a door clicked open to reveal a large grey safe, a metre and a half high by almost the same in width. He drew his robe tighter around him.

‘If you wouldn’t mind . . .’

Makana turned his back while Kasabian’s former assistant bent to the combination lock. A few moments later there was a click, and the heavy door swung open to reveal a series of drawers. Using a key that hung on a chain around his neck, Jules unlocked one of these and opened it to slide out a tray that he carried over to a high table in the middle of the room.

‘These are truly precious items,’ he said in a low whisper. ‘Of all the things Aram owned, these had a special place in his heart.’

The tray was covered in soft black felt and laid out on it in rows were a number of small flat objects. Makana saw broken tablets of stone bearing carvings. Most of them were incomplete, but he could make out what looked like a camel on one and a palm tree on another. Jules drew his attention to a small fragment, no more than six centimetres in length and about half that in width. On it was depicted a slender woman with a hand raised. The detail of the fingers was remarkable.

‘Ishtar,’ breathed Jules. ‘The Babylonian goddess of love and war.’

‘Exactly how much are these worth?’

‘Oh, they’re priceless. I mean, they date back more than six thousand years.’

Makana took a closer look at a figure of a bull with a human head as Jules went on.

‘The Babylonian world was obsessed with darkness. The Underworld played a far more important role than in Ancient Egypt, for example. In the Babylonian universe only the gods inhabited heaven. Mere mortals were condemned to a house of darkness, to eat dust and live in silence.’

‘Sounds familiar,’ muttered Makana.

‘One Sumerian fragment claims that a man with a righteous soul will live for ever.’

‘Then we can all live in hope.’ Makana pointed at the tray. ‘Where did Kasabian get these, and don’t tell me some roundabout story about unconventional ways.’

Jules took a deep breath. ‘Kasabian was selling these pieces on behalf of Kadhim al-Samari.’

Makana looked up. ‘Are you saying that Kasabian was already in touch with Samari when he hired me to find him?’

‘Yes,’ Jules murmured, nodding his head.

Makana lit a cigarette. ‘He already knew him.’

‘He would be contacted from time to time. Aram had no way of contacting Samari directly himself. Samari is very paranoid. He changes telephones every few days.’

‘That’s why you think Samari couldn’t have killed him.’

‘It hardly seems likely, does it? I mean, Aram was working for him.’

Suddenly, the whole picture appeared to have changed. It was unlikely that Samari would kill Kasabian if they were partners, unless there had been a falling out.

‘And they were on good terms – I mean, Samari was happy with what Kasabian was doing for him?’

‘Absolutely. He had no complaints. Aram was discreet and efficient. He sold the pieces quietly and with little fuss. Kadhim al-Samari got his money, and that was all he wanted.’

That left Na’il dead centre, except that he had been blackmailing Kasabian. It would make no sense for him to kill him either. Makana paced across the Persian carpet.

‘Okay, so let’s go back to where I came into the picture. Why did he hire me?’

‘It all went wrong when the American appeared.’

‘Charles Barkley.’

Jules sat down in a high-backed chair close to the wall. ‘When Barkley turned up, Aram got very nervous. He couldn’t sit still. He waited for three days for Samari to call him. I don’t think he slept for those three days.’

‘What happened then?’ Makana had found a tortoiseshell bowl containing coloured beads. He tipped them onto the windowsill and used the shell as an ashtray.

‘When Samari finally called, Aram told him that an American buyer had appeared, that he was interested in a certain German Expressionist painting.’

‘The Franz Marc.’

‘Exactly. Barkley came with a reference from a decent dealer in New York, Norton Granger, whom Aram knew by reputation of course.’

‘But Samari didn’t trust Barkley.’

‘Barkley had mentioned Samari by name. He couldn’t understand where he could have got that information. He smelt a rat. Aram was willing to take the chance. He trusted Barkley and there was a lot of money at stake.’

‘Does Samari have these paintings?’

‘As I understand it, he has some of them. But none of them had been put on the market. How could Barkley have heard of them? How could he connect them to Samari?’

‘Kasabian had to get rid of Barkley, but he had to do it quietly.’

‘Exactly. So he came up with the idea of hiring someone to find Samari, knowing that he would fail.’ Jules shrugged apologetically.

‘Go on,’ said Makana. He didn’t take offence. It was too late for that now. Kasabian had paid for his error with his life.

‘The idea was to throw the American off the scent. Convince him somehow that Samari wasn’t in the country. It wasn’t hard, there is no trace of him. Officially, he never entered Egypt. He has friends in the military who took care of all that.’

Makana paced some more. He lit another cigarette from the butt of the first.

‘I talked to Barkley. I asked him how he had come across the information that the painting was in this country, that Samari had it.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said a lot of things about rumours, but nothing about exactly where they came from.’

‘It happens all the time in this business.’

‘Even if Barkley had heard the paintings were here in Cairo, how could he have connected them to Samari?’

‘I told Aram it was a bad plan. A real investigator might actually find something, but he . . . well, he didn’t think you’d get very far.’

‘And now he’s dead.’ Despite knowing that Kasabian had set him up, the image of the torn and bloody body suspended from the roof beam remained vivid in his mind. Whatever Kasabian had done, he hadn’t deserved to die like that.

‘It doesn’t make sense.’ Jules hung his head. ‘I mean, why torture him like that? What did he want from him?’ He looked up, his eyes widening. ‘The combination to the safe! You don’t think they’ll come after me?’

Makana had no answer to that. Somehow he thought whoever was behind this had their eye on a bigger prize. He nodded at the priceless artefacts.

‘Hardly seems worth giving up your life for a pile of dusty old bits of stone, does it?’

‘Rare objects from the ancient world.’ Jules had a mournful look on his face. ‘This is what fascinated him. Not modern art but the things from our past.’ He looked up. ‘But you’re right, I’d trade it all in just to have him back.’

Makana left him there, surrounded by the treasures of past glory.

Chapter Nineteen

The first thing Makana saw when he opened his eyes was a crow perched on the rail of the deck a few metres away. It was completely motionless, so still that he wondered for a moment if it was real or something that had escaped from his dream. Then the breeze ruffled its feathers. It had grey wings and a jet-black head. It stared unblinkingly, apparently waiting for him to wake up, as if it had been watching over him. Then, in the wink of an eye, it flapped and was gone.

He had slept badly. It was becoming a habit. There was something about this case that seemed to be digging itself into him, sending him back in time. The torturer who haunted his dreams had now become Samari, a faceless creature who stalked the bleak hallways and yawning prison cells of his mind. It was a relief to open his eyes. He found a basket of fresh eggs placed in his kitchen by the ever faithful Aziza, a sign of the ongoing good feeling between himself and Umm Ali. He boiled a couple of them. A cupboard yielded a shield of dry bread that he dampened under the tap and warmed up over the gas flame. It felt like a civilised start to the day. As he was chewing away he looked up and saw the silhouette of a uniformed policeman appear at the top of the path.

They had come on Okasha’s instructions to take him to the morgue. The two officers chatted idly in the front as they drove him at a sedate pace across to Manial Island, talking like old men in a café, discussing the cost of living and Ahly’s chances of winning the league this year.

The Department of Pathology was located in a remote corner of the Faculty of Medicine at Qasr al-Ainy university. Makana was directed through a series of subterranean corridors following the familiar damp fug of scrubbing bleach and human decay, until he came to a white-tiled dissection room where Doctora Siham and Okasha stood waiting. Kasabian’s body, or what was left of it, lay on a steel table between them. The skin was waxy and bruised. A rough line of stitches like mad calligraphy inscribed the Y-shaped incision running from groin to neck where he had been cut open. The thread was brown and resembled old-fashioned catgut. Doctora Siham looked wide awake and impatient.