The Labyrinth of Osiris (11 page)

‘No one would take her,’ said Tirat. ‘Certainly none of the big nationals. Too much baggage. Last I heard, she was working for some campaigning magazine down in Jaffa. You know the sort of thing – worthy, left-wing, circulation of ten.’

‘Have you got a name?’

‘Hang on.’

There was a babble of voices as Tirat asked around the office. It was over a minute before he came back on the line.

‘It’s called
Matzpun ha-Am
,’ he said. ‘Conscience of the Nation. Which makes me think my circulation estimate was a bit optimistic. Office on Rehov Olei Tziyon.’

He gave Ben-Roi an address and phone number, and also the name of the magazine’s editor: Mordechai Yaron.

‘And in case you’re looking, I’m pretty certain she didn’t have any next of kin. Parents committed suicide. Gassed themselves. Which was a bit of a sad fucking irony given that they were Holocaust survivors. She did an article on it. Probably why she was so screwed up herself.’

‘Siblings? Partner?’

‘Not that I ever heard of. I seem to remember she had a cat.’

Ben-Roi asked him to put out some feelers, see if he could come up with any more information. Then, deciding he had more than enough to be going on with, he drew the call to a close.

‘Let me know if you think of anything else,’ he said.

‘And
you
let
me
know if there are any interesting developments.’

Ben-Roi thanked him and hung up. A minute later Tirat was back on the line.

‘One thing that may or may not be relevant,’ he said. ‘Shortly after Rivka left, I remember chatting with Yossi Bellman, the deputy editor, and he told me that of all the death threats she got, there were only two that ever really seemed to rattle her. This is going back a few years so there’s probably no connection, but . . .’

‘Go on,’ said Ben-Roi.

‘One was from the Hebron settlers. She’d done an article on some vigilante squad they were running, used to go around at night kneecapping Arab kids. They got hold of her home address, started sending her jiffy bags full of bullets and rotten meat. That’s Baruch Goldstein country so you have to take that sort of thing seriously.’

Ben-Roi was scribbling notes. ‘The other one?’

‘That was just after the Meltzer scandal. There were some seriously pissed-off Russians who’d forked out millions in bribes in the expectation of landing a load of building contracts which, thanks to Rivka’s article, never materialized.
Russkaya Mafiya
, apparently. Word was they’d put out a contract of their own. On her. Completely freaked her apparently. That was, what, four years ago, so why they’d wait till now . . . like I say, there’s probably no connection, but I thought it was worth mentioning anyway.’

He rang off, leaving Ben-Roi staring down at his pad. The chain was getting longer. And, it seemed, more complex.

L
UXOR

It was past lunchtime when Khalifa and Sariya finally made it back to Luxor, coming into town from the east, on the airport road. As they waited at the lights at the junction of El-Karnak and Al-Mathari, Khalifa suddenly opened his door and got out.

‘See you back at the station,’ he said. ‘There’s someone I need to talk to.’

He slammed the door and set off along El-Karnak. After fifty metres he turned into what looked, from where Sariya was sitting, like a small sweet shop. He emerged a few minutes later clutching a paper bag, but by that point the lights had already switched from red to green and back again, and Mohammed Sariya was long gone.

Everything has changed.
It was what Khalifa thought whenever he walked through the centre of town these days.
Nothing is what it used to be.

Egypt had changed, of course, what with Mubarak going and the new government coming in. Long before the January Revolution had transformed the face of national politics, however, Luxor had already begun its own metamorphosis. Once an endearingly chaotic hotchpotch of dust-grimed buildings and traffic-choked streets, a testament to urban misplanning – or rather absence of planning – the town had for the last few years been in the throes of a radical facelift. The regional governor wanted clearance and modernization and that’s what he was getting, no expense spared, no prisoners taken. Roads were being widened, fancy new traffic-control systems installed, old buildings flattened, new ones erected. The eight-storey pink monstrosity of the New Winter Palace had been torn down; Midan Hagag paved over; the Karnak esplanade remodelled; the entire Corniche el-Nil was being dug up, pedestrianized and dropped to the level of the river.

Most dramatic of all, a hundred-metre-wide swathe of town between Karnak in the north and Luxor Temple in the south – a distance of almost three kilometres – was being swept away to reveal the ceremonial, sphinx-lined avenue that had linked the temples in ancient times. Among the numerous buildings that had been sacrificed to clear this gaping chasm were two with a particular resonance for Khalifa: the old police station beside Luxor Temple, and the drab concrete apartment block where he and his family used to live.

The loss of the station was no great tragedy. He had, after all, dealt with some pretty unpleasant stuff there. The loss of his home, on the other hand, on top of everything else, was beyond heartbreaking. Sixteen years of memories and associations, laughter and tears, joy and pain – all obliterated in the stroke of a wrecking ball so that a bunch of overweight Westerners would have something pretty to photograph. Khalifa had always loved his country’s heritage – if financial necessity had not pushed him into the police force he would almost certainly have ended up working for the Antiquities Service. Now, for the first time in his life, he found himself resenting that heritage. Thousands of people uprooted, thousands of lives turned upside down, and for what? A row of sphinxes that hadn’t even been properly excavated and half of which were concrete replicas. It was madness. The madness of power. And as always in Egypt – as always everywhere – it was those without power who paid the price.

He turned down Sharia Tutankhamun, a narrow street running along the side of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Santa Maria. A hundred metres on, both street and church ended abruptly in an expanse of dusty, rubbish-strewn wasteground. To left and right the Avenue of Sphinxes ran away into the distance, a six-metre deep wound slashed through the heart of town like the trail of some enormous plane crash. This was one of several points along its length where the avenue had yet to be excavated, leaving a land-bridge allowing you to cross the trench. Khalifa walked over to Sharia Ahmes and made his way along to a ramshackle building with peeling paintwork, broken shutters and a Coptic cross above its door. A sign on the wall read: ‘Good Samaritan Society for Handicapped Children’. He climbed the front steps and entered the building.

Inside, in the foyer, a young boy was sitting on a Dayun motorbike. Spindly-legged and hunchbacked, he was rocking back and forth, making a growling noise like the roar of an engine. Rifling in his paper bag, Khalifa produced a chocolate bar and handed it over.

‘I’m looking for Demiana,’ he said. ‘Demiana Barakat.’

The boy contemplated the bar. Then, without saying anything, he slipped off the bike, took Khalifa’s hand and led him through a door into a large sitting room. There were more children in here, some in wheelchairs, some playing on the floor, some sprawling listlessly on a sofa watching cartoons on an ancient black-and-white TV. A young man was sitting at a table spoon-feeding a baby who didn’t have any arms.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m looking for Demiana.’

‘In there.’ The man nodded towards a door on the far side of the room.

Khalifa gave him the paper bag, indicated that its contents were to be distributed among the children, and went over to the door, the hunchbacked boy still clutching his hand. It was ajar and, giving it a tap, Khalifa pushed it open. A thin, angular woman with greying hair and a small gold cross around her neck was sitting inside, her elbows resting on a large, cluttered desk, her head in her hands. She looked up. Behind her gold-rimmed glasses, her eyes were red.

‘Yusuf,’ she said, forcing a smile across her face. ‘What a lovely surprise.’

‘Is this a bad moment?’

‘Right now it’s always a bad moment. Come in, come in.’

Removing her glasses, she wiped her eyes and waved Khalifa forward. The boy came with him.

‘Helmi, why don’t you go outside and play on your motorbike?’

Still the boy held on, and the woman was forced to come round the table and gently ease his hand away.

‘Off you go, there’s a good boy. Go and have an adventure.’

She kissed his head and led him back out into the sitting room, closing the door after him.

‘What did you give him?’ she asked as she returned to the desk.

‘A chocolate bar.’

She smiled. ‘He likes people who give him things. Gets attached to them. Please, sit. Can we get you tea? Coffee?’

‘I’m fine,
shukran
,’ said Khalifa, taking the chair in front of the desk. ‘Sorry to intrude.’

‘Don’t be silly. It’s good to see you. It’s always good to see you. It’s been too long.’

Khalifa and Demiana Barakat went way back. One of his first cases after being posted down to Luxor from his native Giza had involved the town’s Coptic community, and Demiana had been roped in as a liaison figure. As well as running the Good Samaritan Society and half a dozen other charitable organizations, she sat on the municipal council and edited a small community newspaper. If anyone had a more in-depth knowledge of the Coptic world than Demiana Barakat, Khalifa had yet to meet them.

‘How’s Zenab doing?’ she asked.

‘Good,’ he replied. ‘Much better. She’s . . .’ He hesitated, not quite sure what else he could add. He couldn’t think of anything and so just gave an inane nod and deflected the conversation. ‘Any news on the church?’

‘Still fighting it, although the result’s a foregone conclusion. The question is when, not if.’

Like Khalifa’s old home, like the old police station, like so many other buildings, the Church of Santa Maria was scheduled for demolition to make way for the Avenue of Sphinxes.

‘At least this place is safe,’ he said.

‘Not for much longer.’ She held up a sheet of paper. ‘Letter from the governor’s office. They’re halving our funding. Which is as good as saying they’re closing us down. They can find the money to dig a three-kilometre hole in the ground, but for helpless children . . .’

She removed her glasses and wiped her eyes again. ‘That boy who brought you in. Helmi. He’s been here his whole life. Some volunteers found him when he was just a baby. Parents had left him on a rubbish dump, would you believe. What’s he going to do? Where’s he going to go?’ Her voice was starting to catch. ‘It’s just such a cruel world,’ she murmured. ‘Such a bloody cruel world. But then you know that, don’t you, Yusuf?’

‘Yes,’ said Khalifa. ‘I do.’

For a moment their eyes held. Then, drawing a deep breath, she laid the letter aside and placed her hands on the table, palms down, suddenly businesslike.

‘Anyway, I’m sure you didn’t come here to listen to my woes. What can I do for you?’

Khalifa shifted uncomfortably. After what she’d just told him it didn’t seem particularly appropriate to be asking for her help, not with everything else she had on her plate. She saw what he was thinking and smiled.

‘Come on, Yusuf. We’ve known each other long enough. Spit it out.’

‘It’s not that important,’ he mumbled. ‘It can—’

‘Yusuf!’

‘OK, OK. I wanted to pick your brains about the Coptic community.’

She clasped her hands on the desk. ‘Pick away.’

‘You’ve got your ear to the ground. Have you heard of any anti-Christian activity lately? Attacks, vandalism?’

‘There are always attacks on Copts. You know that as well as I do. Only last week there was a guy up in Nag Hammadi—’

‘Not in Middle Egypt,’ he said, cutting her off. ‘Around here. Around Luxor.’

Her eyes narrowed. ‘Why? Has something happened?’

Khalifa told her about the farmer and his poisoned well.

‘His cousin’s water went bad as well,’ he said. ‘The farmer thinks it’s someone from the next-door village, but the headman denies any knowledge. I was just wondering if it’s a localized problem or part of a wider pattern.’

She sat back, fiddling with the small silver crucifix around her neck. Overhead an ancient ceiling fan flopped lazily around, doing almost nothing to dispel the heat in the room.

‘I’ve not heard anything,’ she said after a long pause. ‘There’s a lot of tension up north, as you know, but around here things have always been pretty quiet, thank God. There was that Shaykh who used to preach out in the villages, Omar whatever-his-name-was . . .’

‘Abd-el Karim,’ said Khalifa.

‘That’s the one. He was always whipping up trouble, although I seem to remember most of his preaching was anti-Semitic rather than anti-Christian. And there was that incident a couple of months back when the shoe-shine guy got thrown in the Nile. He was a Copt, although I think it was more to do with money than religion.’

She fell silent, fingering the cross. Outside the door a child had started crying, hoarse, racking sobs that seemed to shake the whole building.

‘I really can’t think of anything,’ she said eventually. ‘We’re a minority community, so we’re always on our guard, particularly after the Alexandria church bombing, and the Imbaba riots. But to date we’ve not had anything like the problems they have had up in places like Farshut. No violence, certainly. There are Muslims who don’t want to mix with us, and people in my community who don’t want to mix with Muslims, but in general everyone mucks along pretty well. The occasional unfriendly look’s about as bad as it gets. That and having our church knocked down. But then they’ve been bulldozing mosques as well, so you can’t really blame that on religious intolerance.’

‘Just the idiots who run our town,’ said Khalifa.

‘Second that.’

There was a knock on the door. The young man Khalifa had seen earlier put his head into the room and told Demiana the Bank Misr people were due in a couple of minutes.