The Cairo Diary (10 page)

And he untied knots with skill.

His greatest qualities in this respect were his discretion, of course, and on the other hand his address book. His name was familiar to many benches in the
qawha,
and beside old Cairo's public fountains, as well as to the concierges of large hotels or the secretaries at the ministries.

Matheson had been in Cairo for nine years. He had come at his own request, as soon as he entered the police force, once he had obtained his law diploma. Cairo made sense with its exoticism, adventures, sunshine, and above all its less rigid hierarchy, more inclined to promote him swiftly and enable him to become an investigator. The reality had proved him right.

Moreover, he enjoyed a freedom to maneuver here that it would have been impossible for him to find in London or anywhere else in England. And after nine years spent tanning his skin beneath the heat of the pyramids, he had never asked to return home. On the contrary, he did everything to ensure that his file remained forgotten in the archives. He had seen three British High Commissioners arrive, one after the other; he had been present at the anticolonial demonstrations, and at their episodes of violence; he had witnessed the birth of Egyptian independence, and the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen—almost a decade filled with glory and dramatic incidents that had fascinated him. And Cairo had him in its grasp.

His points of reference were in the line of minarets on the rooftops, in the song of the muezzins that punctuated the day in a less martial manner than Big Ben, in the splendor of an Englishman's life among the Arabs. And also in the daily spice that wafted in from the desert onto all their heads: the threat of a danger that might rise up at any moment, in any possible form. This is how his life played out in the city of
One Thousand and One Nights.
Although Matheson was quintessentially British, the London fog and the predictability of life beside the Thames had lost their charm.

Here, all Westerners had the right to carry a weapon; here, the nights might flare up in a moment under pressure from the nationalists; each meal had a flavor of antiquity. In Cairo, history was no longer made, but punctuated; people lived with it for company; the mysteries had a material quality that was found nowhere else; the legends became reality; the sand and the sun edged the city and life with a bitter taste that incited people to live ever more intensely.

Cairo was a cobra, lurking between the Mokattam Hills and the Nile. Rather than proving lethal, its bite caused a total dependence, which could never be broken.

The Egyptian police, under the command of Russel Pasha, carried out the main body of the investigation work, although still overseen here and there by Englishmen in strategic posts. Jeremy Matheson's main responsibility was for matters involving Western people or goods, but his role was above all political. Two-faced Egypt owed it to itself to function with this cumbersome, two-headed power—to satisfy sometimes the colonial whims of one set of people, sometimes the fervor for identity of the others.

Just as he didn't give a damn about promotion now that he was a detective, Jeremy Matheson cared nothing for this demagogic will. He served the interests of his office, beyond that of the nation, he told himself over and over again. He carried out his investigations, playing on both cultural stages like a true juggler.

He handled the murder of a vagrant and a theft from a rich Englishman's home in exactly the same way.

He knew only too well how his Cairo colleagues could classify an investigation and its importance in accordance with the interests at stake, the social classes concerned, or quite simply according to their own preferences. And Matheson made it his duty to stir up ill-feeling in this world where a total absence of probity reigned. Not because he was himself a man of integrity—far from it—but simply to give the occasional hefty kick to this nest of snakes and watch them writhe about convulsively.

Matheson had built up his own boundary, extremely narrow, yet permeable, between his official work and the work he did privately to render services. He very rarely obtained money for these services, but he nourished his address book, created biographical dossiers on this person and that person, when necessary giving himself permission to ask for a service in return. This was how his extended network of knowledge operated.

When, at the end of February, he had heard talk in the corridors of his department about the body of a child found in an abandoned house in the northwest of the Abbasiya district, Jeremy Matheson had stopped to listen.

The news in itself, although macabre, was not inconceivable. That part of Cairo was an assembly of hovels where death struck very often; what worried him more was the condition of the child when discovered.

Matheson had left his office to join the two police officers. The one who had just come back from the scene still looked as pale as the sail of a felucca. He didn't allow himself to give precise details, however he confided that the child had been broken in two around the pelvis, as if it were made of light wood, snapped at an atrocious angle, the torso bent backward, the flesh pierced by the hip bones.

There had been no rape, but there were traces of a sexual nature.

The investigation was entrusted to an inspector named Azim Abd el-Dayim, a native of Cairo who knew el-Abbasiya district well: the very least that was needed in order to work there without running the risk of being cut into pieces in such a place. He found no witnesses, no convincing clues.

On March 2, a six-year-old girl was found in a sordid alleyway in el-Huseiniya. She was not broken in two, but her state was horrible in other ways. Five men had seen her, and not one had managed to retain his dignity; all had dissolved into tears, some had vomited, and others had nightmares for several nights.

Samir was the third innocent to be wiped out.

His head lying flat on the stone of a tomb in the cemetery of Bab el-Nasr.

The link between these crimes was in no doubt. The violence was different each time, but exercised with such ferocity that one might doubt the human nature of the culprit.

The three children came from poor areas, from families without resources.

The three children were around the same age.

The three children had been tortured to death, clawed, bitten until pieces of flesh were torn away.

The three children had been sullied.

In less than two weeks.

Jeremy Matheson had picked up his phone, and then got moving. He abandoned his investigation into the murder of an archaeologist carrying out excavations in the basements of Cairo; the case wasn't coming to anything anyway.

And he obtained the investigation into the dead children.

Azim Abd el-Dayim became his colleague, because he spoke Arabic and because he didn't have the same color skin.

Three days later, on March 14, 1928, the telephone rang.

And Jeremy Matheson's life was turned upside-down forever.

12

Marion rested the black book on her knees and drank the last mouthful of gin and orange juice, before pouring herself a second glass.

The alcohol was still burning her throat, producing a bitter aftertaste. A taste that echoed many others, among the pages of the notebook she was reading.

Her fingers began stroking the cover.

For a private diary, it was pleasant to read—the start, anyway.

The author had started writing a little after the beginning of the facts he related. This introduction to the subject was a kind of long flashback.

In the first sentences the melancholy came through. Jeremy Matheson was a wounded man, stanching his suffering with words on paper bandages. Contrary to what he stated in the prologue, his writing felt much more than just an account written for the purposes of information. He was emptying his overflowing soul.

The other element that disturbed Marion was that he very seldom said
I
. Instead, he preferred to include himself among other people so as to say
we,
using the police, the English, men, and other groups as often as possible.

On the other hand, the events heralded in the latest pages she had read were highly disagreeable to Marion. The murders of those children.

She wasn't sure she wanted to know.

And yet there was this feeling of curiosity.

She bent over her alarm clock to check the time.

11:12.

She didn't feel particularly tired. The intrusion into her home had shaken her up too much. The fear and the anger had evaporated with the tale.

She glanced briefly at the sloping roofs of the village.

Then the book fell open in her hands again.

*   *   *

As soon as he had hung up, Jeremy Matheson informed Azim, his colleague, and they headed for the
sharia
*
Muhammad Ali, which they drove along before forking off eastward, beneath the ramparts of the Citadel. They left the city, crossing an ancient cemetery to reach the Tombs of the Caliphs.

In the vehicle, they went over Azim's investigations to date. Managing everything on his own, he had delegated as much as possible, in order to gain time. Police officers had gone to take statements from each family, while others went from door to door, to ask the inhabitants of the districts concerned if they had seen or heard anything unusual on the nights of the murders. Azim centralized the reports, went over them with a fine-tooth comb, and attempted to identify a lead, without success. He had made hardly any progress since the first day; all he had was a clear conscience, knowing he had done his work to the best of his ability.

Three victims, perhaps four today.

Children just a few years old, living in the same area, northeastern Cairo, all from very poor families. That was all they had.

A tarred road ran parallel to the necropolis, and they were able to park alongside the vehicles that were already there; Jeremy and Azim covered the rest of the distance on foot, along the fringes of the desert.

It was late morning, and the temperature was around eighty-five degrees. The heat seemed to emerge from the ground itself, weaving blurred wreaths in the air, which climbed toward the heavens, obscuring the horizon. The tall minarets of the tombs cast their shadows on the sand, outlining a calm path, inviting others to walk in their footsteps, like a religious message filtered beyond the stone.

Roofless walls followed one another in successive waves, their multicolored bricks forming pink, red, and white battlements around the cells. The domes and towers rose up all around, in buzzing hives beneath the one eye of Ra.

Richard Pallister, the police photographer, was at the entrance to a blind alley, seated on a small boulder, his hat on one knee and his camera bag at his feet. He was mopping his brow with a handkerchief, less from the heat than from the shock.

And yet the heat was unusually powerful for the season.

Pallister lifted his head to look at the new arrivals; his eyelids were swollen and red, his gaze vacant.

Pallister looked for a landmark. The one that distinguished men from beasts, the landmark that shines permanently like a red boundary stone on the verge of consciousness, and that looms up in front of it when thoughts go too far.

His face was colored with a transparent film that slid little by little from his hair to his chin, in salty droplets, leaving pallid skin in its wake. His lips were trembling.

When Jeremy reached him, the photographer murmured something, but it was the emotion in his eyes that made Jeremy understand. He was begging him not to go there.

Nevertheless, Jeremy entered the narrow alleyway. He heard Pallister begin to sob.

The right-hand wall belonged to a tomb that looked above all like a house with a flat roof, white and blind. Opposite, the wall was much older; it had been crumbling for a long time. Its skeleton of bricks was as black as charred bone, a loose mesh with the purple hues of the desert grew between each stone, similar to dried blood; the construction was now no more than a geological corpse, conferring upon the alleyway a suffocating appearance and a smell of dust.

It ran on in this way for twenty yards.

Two natives of Cairo, wearing cheap suits and
tarbooshes
*
were standing right at the end, their hands on their hips. The two men stood in silence, avoiding looking at the ground.

As soon as they spotted Jeremy Matheson they came to meet him, only too happy to be able to distance themselves for a moment from this cursed place.

“A
dragoman
†
found it this morning, while preparing his itinerary,” reported the first man with a pronounced accent that made him roll his
r
s. “They thought about telling you straightaway; it's too much like the previous ones.…”

Without a word, Matheson laid a hand on the man's shoulder to move him out of the way. He approached what was spattering the beaten earth and the walls of the alley.

A child aged around ten.

Bled-out and distorted, as if by an all-powerful giant who had discovered this strange toy, and manipulated it until it was worn-out and broken, kneading it, shattering it, bursting it; and now the child was lying like a shapeless parcel, its only remaining human aspect its arms and legs, and a swollen head whose hair had turned white with terror.

Matheson swallowed his saliva, and it went down his throat with a moist echo.

There were pins and needles in his legs. He closed his eyes to concentrate on his breathing. Swiftly he noticed how fast his heart was beating.

Calm down. Breathe.

Azim took hold of his arm gently.

“Are you going to be all right?” he asked in a reassuring, almost maternal voice.

Almost white, Jeremy turned to look at him.

Azim was wearing the traditional turban, and a Western shirt and trousers. His finely shaped, ebony-black mustache danced on his upper lip. He carried his excess weight with grace, ever serene, his movements always catlike.